Moving an intranet structure from a producer logic to a user logic is probably the hardest thing an intranet manager will ever have to do, especially in large, complex organisations.
Intranets tend to start with a site per department, a site per business unit, a site per function, etc. Even getting someone to take responsibility for each of these sites can be difficult.
Most intranets I've seen started with this type of structure at the beginning. And it's not surprising. Personally, I believe it was the only way to get large intranets going. It became a question of pride and visibility: I have a site, I exist.
A major problem on these sites was the mixture of information and services for the people of the department, their projects and "internal" news and updates, and the information and services the department provides to other employees. "Us for us" and "Us for them".
Was the site supposed to propose services to other employees or serve the needs of the members of that function or department?
In addition to this confusion, and along with a proliferation of sites, headquarters would decide to implement a so-called global home page. So-called, because it did not necessarily meet everyone's needs.
Nonetheless, competition started for positions on the Home Page. The top prize was to get a spot in the primary navigation bar. And there was only room for so many!
Moving from this situation to a user logic structure raises lots of issues:
- First, you have to know what users need.
- Then you have to define the primary navigation items - the high level breakdown of all the intranet content.
- Then you have to find owners for the sections, and that's where the difficulties lie.
For example, if you have a sections called Employee Services, Reference or Practical Information, who will be accountable for ensuring that they meet employees' needs? These categories do not fall naturally into the areas or responsibility of single departments or functions.
These sections will be fed by different sources of information, managed by different people, departments and functions. Each provider will be responsible for the quality of his/her information.
But who has overall responsibility? And even more tricky - how do you explain to the head of a department that his/her information will no longer be in a single site, but will be distributed through several different sites - none of which he/she owns.
Suddenly this department has lost visibility. This may be politically difficult. So what is the answer?
Several points come to mind:
- A negotiated intranet structure or what I call a "user architecture" with a limited number of high level categories must be defined and agreed upon by a workgroup with all major functions and departments represented.
- The members of this workgroup must be high enough in the organisational hierarchy to be able to make decisions, yet close enough to real users and operations to understand what people need.
- The proposed user architecture must be validated at a very high level in the organisation.
- The responsibilities for sections and for providing content must be incorporated into job and role definitions.
- Visibility must be given to content providers as much as to owners of sections.
In a global organisation, defining the high level user architecture may take months of discussion, dozens of web and telephone conferences among the workgroup members, and 2 or more rounds or proposals.
But in the end it is worth it. The final decisions will have a greater chance of being implemented, sustainable and understood.
I have not talked here about user testing, which of course needs to be done on the global scale before finalising any proposed structure.
Nor have I talked about how an external facilitator can be essential if the context is highly complex and political.
These would both be good subjects for another post!
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