It has to stop. The current metaphor of the intranet as an "internal website for staff" is crippling us. This metaphor is a direct cause of our unhealthy focus on just the usability, information architecture and content of the "site". We spend endless amount of time working on maintaining intranets, and yet intranets today are little different from the way they were ten years ago. Along the way, the road is littered with burnt out intranet teams, wearied by the struggle to get organisations to finally "recognise the value of the intranet". Instead of the "intranet as website" metaphor, we

The enemy of intranets is not resistance to change, it is apathy, which must be overcome to build support and resources.

An intranet homepage policy is tool that can provide some welcome support to intranet managers as well as providing a clear direction to business units…

Many intranet teams see themselves as battling resistance to change when attempting to grow the intranet or deliver new functionality. The challenge is perceived as overcoming these barriers to a successful intranet. In practice, though, the real enemy of intranets is apathy. While at some level the organisation (and staff) recognise the need for an intranet, it is never an immediate enough issue to warrant significant resources. Without a sense of urgency or a real mandate, intranet teams often limp along, targeting individual needs but never capturing the interest of the organisation as a whole. This briefing identifies the impact

The intranet homepage can be the most coveted piece of online real estate in your organisation. Everyone will have their own firm view as to how the homepage should be used to drive organisational imperatives. Managing these competing priorities is difficult and intranet managers are often placed in the position of defending the homepage from its own popularity, In doing so they are ensuring that it is able to perform its primary task of directing users to the material that they require to perform their day-to-day jobs. This is often an unpopular stance to take and is often assumed with

The intranet is not a one-off project. Instead, it must be supported by an ongoing process that ensures that the site continues to be effective. Beyond this, the intranet must also grow to match the ongoing evolution of the organisation that it serves. In practice, there are a wide range of activities that intranet teams should conduct on a monthly basis. This article explores a good number of these, focusing on tasks that will build and nurture the intranet. Monthly intranet activities There are many month-to-month responsibilities for the intranet team. Some of these relate to maintaining the intranet and

Intranet teams need to be clear on where they are heading, and what they will deliver. Typically, this involves writing either a bullet-point list of goals or a 20-page intranet strategy. In practice, the list of goals is too short (and too abstract), while the intranet strategy documents are often wordy but unclear. Neither form works well. What is needed is a single sheet of paper that captures where the intranet is at, where it is going, and what this means in the short-term in terms of actual deliverables. This is the basis for the "intranet concept", a succinct yet

An intranet concept is a single sheet of paper which outlines where the intranet is at, where it is going, and what it will deliver…

This article provides a long (but still not comprehensive) list of ongoing tasks for intranet teams.

Intranet redesigns are not small projects. There is a significant amount of design, usability and information architecture work, not to mention the laborious content migration process. What is launched is almost certainly an improvement on the old intranet, but the question must be asked: how much of an improvement? In too many cases, the vast majority of effort is devoted to the intranet home page, the overall information architecture and the page layout. Lower pages in the site are often migrated more- or-less unchanged, with much of the internal structure within sections only slightly updated from the old intranet. This