Intranet resources – the eternal vicious circle

Intranets don’t work. Why? Because  not enough resources are given to them to ensure they have a chance of success. Why aren’t resources made available? Because intranets don’t work. A vicious circle is born.

In this post I’m attempting to provide an approach that may help intranet teams to make the case for better resources and to break out of this vicious circle for good.

Improving your intranet – keep it sustainable using kaizen

Things can go so badly wrong with an intranet that the intranet team is left floundering.  Many intranet teams can get dispirited because the myriad of problems seem insurmountable, the size of a mountain, or at least an elephant.

What usually happens then is that an equally large re-design project with the turning circle of an oil tanker is initiated. However vital parts of the re-design don’t work or even make the problem worse and at the end of the project the team throw their hands up in the air in exasperation and doom and gloom descends once more. Sound familiar?

James Robertson talking at the BBC last year stated research has shown that  intranet re-designs in general do not work and Lou Rosenfeld, as quoted in the Brainspill blog,  felt that many re-designs were only skin deep anyway –

‘Re-design” implies only a cosmetic change. Too many redesigns are just changing the window dressing on the same product – decidedly not changing the product itself.  If the problem that prompts a redesign is that the information isn’t being used (because it’s not well presented/organized/found/etc), then changing what color it is doesn’t genuinely help.’

So what is to be done? How can we get rid of the elephant? Simple – we eat it. And how do you eat an elephant? One slice at a time ……or in other words by adopting kaizen.

What NOT to do with your intranet (part 2)

Some more thoughts –

Don’t just make your intranet usable, make it useful

 James Robertson of Step Two makes the distiction clear in his article. Usability is a must. If staff can’t find information then it might as well not exist. However usability is not enough by itself. When staff find content it must also be –