Designing an Employee Intranet
How To Determine What Information Is Needed for Effective Intranets
There's a lot to designing an intranet for your employees. The key to doing it well is providing the information they need to do their jobs along with a few extras.
What do you think the reason is that companies have an intranet today? If you said to “share information”, you’d be right. But it’s not as simple as going out and buying a content management product and then posting a bunch of information. You need to ask yourself (and your employees) some very important questions when you get started and constantly re-ask them throughout the life of your intranet.
Who is the Audience?
You are likely to have more than one audience. Employees are an overall audience, but then if you look closely, you should be subsets within this core audience. For example, managers, sales representatives, call centre operators and help desk personal are all audiences with unique information needs.
What Do They Need to Know (To Do Their Jobs)?
Take each of your defined audiences and ask them questions. What information do they need to do their jobs? You’ll likely get a list a mile long for each audience. Try to get some degree of priority of the information to help you prioritize later on.
What Do They Want to Know?
There are going to be areas on the intranet that contain information that is not applicable to a specific job function. Payroll information, statutory holidays, the weather, cafeteria menu, these are all examples of things employees want to know and see on the intranet.
Who Owns the Information You Need to Provide? Who Knows it the Best?
Find your information owners and the experts who know the material the best and how to explain it to online writers/authors or who can write it themselves. These people can help you answer the next two questions:
In What Format(s) is the Information Available?
Is the information available online already? Is it available externally on the internet somewhere? Is it on document format, audio, video? Knowing this helps you understand how easy it will be to migrate it to the intranet site. You can also determine if the intranet is going to be your record of source for this information going forward.
Does the Information Need to Be Updated?
How often? Does the information need to be updated on a regular basis? Does it need to be updated before it goes on the intranet for the first time? Knowing that it needs work before can be made available to the audience helps you prioritize as does knowing how often it needs to be updated.
These are just some of the questions you need to ask and answer to plan your intranet. It’s important to provide the right information to the right people, in the right format at the right time. The best approach is to create a number of spreadsheets, one or more for each audience, and then start documenting the answers to these questions. These will very likely be living documents as information needs tend to change on a regular basis.
You also need to keep in mind that you can’t provide all the information immediately and get your intranet up and running quickly. You will need to prioritize the information that is provided and the functionality that is available, giving the most important information and capabilities first.
In some cases, information that is high profile but not necessarily required for a job gets put to the top of the pile. These tend to be quick wins to help gain support as you build the intranet. Asking these questions should help you prioritize the order of information availability.
Note that these questions can also (and should also) be asked when designing and maintaining your internet website. The answers will be different depending on the purpose of your internet, but the questions are the same.
