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Department Intranets |
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Many corporate intranets are actually made up of content directly authored or otherwise provided by representatives of each department of the corporation. In fact, some intranets are simply a collection of such departmental sites. While managing a corporate intranet is a considerable challenge, managing a departmental intranet site poses its own challenges and pitfalls. Most books and articles concerning intranet publishing focus on the issues that face members of the centralized team that are responsible for the overall management of the entire corporate intranet. Yet, there is probably a larger audience of persons involved in managing departmental intranet sites. Think about your own company. Aren't there more departments (and departmental publishers) than members of the intranet management team? While most ideas and information concerning general intranet and web management are applicable to departmental sites and content, here are a few tips specifically to help anyone managing a departmental site. Tip #1: Make sure department management is committed to the idea. Of course this is just good business sense for any job related assignment, but sometimes gets skipped. If your title is something like "Finance Department Intranet Manager" and all of your goals and objectives are focused on the departmental site, then you probably have no worries. But many persons managing such sites do so simply as an "additional responsibility." This sometimes can happen because of a belief by upper management that web publishing is easy. Heck, their twelve-year-old nephew has a web site. Of course, the "additional responsibility" approach can lead to a departmental site that looks like it was designed by a twelve-year-old. If you have been tasked with managing, publishing, or improving the departmental site, make sure that your goals, objectives, time allocation, or other planning tool shows the time commitment necessary to do the job. In fact, this commitment should stretch into the future, since a site that requires 80 hours to roll out in the first quarter will probably require 80 hours of effort in each subsequent quarter for updates, additions, improvements, and redesigns. If management is unwilling to commit your time to managing the site, you will never find time to create a site that truly offers business value. Tip #2: Decide on your target audience. Once again, just good business sense for any web publishing effort. The twist is that a departmental intranet manager can almost always identify two (maybe more) distinct audiences for the site. The most common audiences are the entire employee population and members of the publishing department itself. In many cases, the needs of these two groups are different enough to warrant two sites, or at least two different entry points with vastly different navigation and perhaps some protected areas. The site for department members should be made up of tools focused on helping the department accomplish work. The site for the rest of the employee population should offer access to the services or work product of the department, along with helpful information to assist those outside the department in understanding how the department relates to other departments and the company as a whole. Tip #3: Offer content to meet the needs of your target audience. Some early departmental intranet sites offered little more than an organizational chart, pictures of the last department potluck, and some "cool" graphics. While most have moved beyond that, many still fall short of the goal of offering business value to the corporation. For instance, I have never seen anyone engaged in a desperate search to find the mission statement of another department, yet it is frequently featured prominently. No harm done, but the effort might be better spent elsewhere. If you think you already know the needs of your target audience, you are probably wrong. To find out what will meet the needs of your target audience, watch them work. Since this may be difficult, an alternative might be to ask members of your department to jot down the topic of any e-mail messages or phone calls for information about the work of the department. This will tell you why employees are calling to bother people in the department. If you can give the rest of the company an easier alternative, like just looking up some information on your intranet site, they will stop bothering folks in the department and will probably be very excited that they didn't have to call. Publish the things that are most helpful, not just the things that are easiest to publish. Tip #4: No secret code. I used to read RFP's that defined MIB specifications for SNMP. While I am sure many readers understand exactly what this means, I would venture that many do not. Most departments have their own language surrounding their primary functions that may be poorly understood by those outside the department. It is important to keep this in mind when writing guides and policies, and especially important when designing the wording of links to help employees navigate the site. A link entitled "Network configuration for your computer" will probably make sense to more people than "DHCP configuration standards." Use language that your audience will understand. A corollary to this idea is to always test pages, applications, link labels, and even the entire site with members of your target audience. Pages that look just great to your boss and other members of your department may make no sense to employees outside the department. In fact, members of your department may scoff at the results of your employee testing. They may find it difficult to believe that some employees have no idea what a proxy server does. If this happens, simply have them sit through a test session. It's usually a very enlightening experience. Simply following the ideas listed above does not guarantee success. But, failing to recognize the importance of these factors can lead to a departmental site that does not offer any business value to the corporation. This means wasted time and resources, and in these times of budget tightening such wastefulness can be disastrous. |
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