Streamline Training & Documentation: Getting Your Intranet Up to Snuff

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Getting Your Intranet Up to Snuff

One of the more frustrating documentation projects I've worked on involved trying to help a client improve their intranet. There were two basic problems: the project leader declined to devote time and attention to the project (computer literacy was not his strong suit), and the IT person who was responsible for handling updates always had other things to do. It was a hopeless situation because the client was not able to replace this obviously inadequate duo with people genuinely committed to getting the job done.

I take some slight consolation in knowing that my experience was my no means unique. On May 14 the Wall Street Journal, noting how widespread the problem of user-unfriendly intranets is, published several articles offering advice on how to correct the situation. Two of the articles were particularly useful.

In the first article, Andrew Blackman lists typical intranet problems — missing information, duplicate information, information that is out-of-date, and information that is less-than-easy to find — and then describes some of the tools and strategies companies are adopting to mitigate these problems.

A key goal is to establish a virtuous circle in which people use an intranet, find it helps them with their work, are motivated to contribute themselves, and thereby make the intranet more appealing to others. It's important to ensure that contributions are easy to enter into the system (though there does need to be a level of oversight for quality control).

Improvements to the intranet search function are centered on returning both relevant documents and the names of people with relevant expertise:

For example, when users of Microsoft's intranet product, SharePoint Server 2007, type in a query, they receive not only a list of relevant documents and articles, but also a list of people who are experts on the subject. The people are presented in order of "social distance," with people you've named as your colleagues appearing at the top, followed by your colleagues' colleagues and finally everyone else.

A neat adjunct is a presence awareness feature that lets you know the availability of an internal person whose name comes up in response to a search query.

Finally, a hugely valuable feature — providing work teams with collaborative workspace — is increasingly built into intranet software.

The second article is an interview Vauhini Vara conducted with Kara Coyne, director of research at Nielsen Norman Group, a technology consulting firm that conducts a contest each year to find the world's best intranets. Along with the informational value of a good intranet, Coyne touts its motivational value:

... managers or leaders on a team will put videos online or announcements. Employees really watch these things, really read them and get motivated by them.

When asked about common intranet shortcomings, Coyne cites clutter, unintuitive navigation, and weak search functionality. Her suggestions for relatively easy improvements include posting daily news items and making sure content is interesting and current. Coyne's hope for intranets of the future is that they will be

much cleaner, much more beautiful, and much more straightforward — getting rid of all the headings and categories and boxes and branding.

She also points out that some of the most popular features on intranets are not necessarily what would first come to mind. It turns out that employees really like things like being able to post classified ads, request a special meal at the cafeteria, and check the schedule of recreational activities.

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Labels: Documentation, Knowledge management, Usability, Web 2.0

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