WIC Case Study – Part 2: Driving Intranet Improvements

Last month I posted a case study on WIC results received in regards to employee contribution and publishing on the Intranet. While this case study is on how visible improvements are in your intranet, I still think it an important aspect of our WIC results as it indicated how much attention our users paid our Intranet and whether they noticed the changes and improvements we delivered.

Check out my related post: WIC Case Study – Part 1: Employee Publishing on the Intranet.

Driving Intranet Improvements Case Study

Click on any of the graphs below to view our results in detail

Overview

Over the past 12 months we have done considerable developments to our site including:

• redeveloped 4 of the major department/team sites, including IT and HR;
• created a new major section to house orphaned/floating information and generated a mass of new content;
• developed a blog for the Managing Director
• delivered a rewards program using an eCard system
• re-introduced the company newsletter online (as opposed to the original email version)
• ensured that the homepage news feed stays alive and current
• promoted company fundraisers through a dedicated online space
• introduced custom workflows to replace manual procedures

 

Process

There has been little promotion on developments on the Intranet and any promotion that has been done is all linked in with the intranet (ie article in our newsletter is online, homepage news announcements).

Regular auditing and user satisfaction surveys have recently been introduced and will continue to be conducted annually as part of our Governance. We also have a functionality metric** that we use to rate each section of our Intranet, as well as using usage tracking software to identify areas that are underutilised.

All of these will help us identify areas that are underperforming, track how our improvements and changes have been received and where we need to focus our attention.

Benefits/Value

Visible change is quite critical in gaining your end-users’s trust and confidence in your Intranet. If they are able to easily see when content was last updated they feel more confident that it is relevant and up to date. It is also encouraging for them to realise that feedback they have given about our intranet is acted upon (where relevant of course)

Tips

Intranets need to be able to respond to user and business needs in a timely manner otherwise they can quickly become obsolete. Always make sure you are gathering feedback on how your intranet is performing and then develop a roadmap to prioritise and action the needs that arise from that analysis. Regular auditing and user satisfaction surveys are a great starting point.

Future Plans*

I once read that you should aim to improve your intranet by 20% each year. I think this is a good baseline. We have slightly more aggressive and ambitious goals than that for the next 18-24 months but I think they key point is to aim to drive improvements each year.

** The direction and structure of the Brightstar Intranet have changed substantially since this case study in April. We are now looking at restructuring our intranet into two separate online spaces: one of collaboration and one for communication to better support the business longer term. Training is still quite a big part of this as we will be expecting our collaboration space site owners to take full control of their sites’ permissions, publishing and maintenance with less reliance on the Intranet team who will be focussing their efforts on the more structured communications orientated Intranet space and other support areas.

** The functionality metric is being updated to reflect our new intranet spaces and will be adjusted to assess and track our collaboration workspaces.