Connie’s Top 5 Lessons for Neophyte Intranet Managers
These are the top 5 lessons I learned at the recent KM World and Intranets 2005 conference, for someone (like me) just setting out to create an intranet:
1. Don’t jump into buying a system right away. Spending only 3 months finding and picking a content management system, it could take a year or more to prepare your content. Better to spend 9 months gathering together content and cleaning it up, and then buying the system. Otherwise you pay for something that will just sit there.
2. Similarly, figure out the layout of your intranet or website before buying the underlying system. Work with your user base at this point to get an idea of what layouts they will need; this will also allow the user base to have early involvement and feel part of creating the change. Have them sort cards representing sections of the site, or set up a small sample system (such as with Microsoft Sharepoint) to test out your ideas and get feedback from users.
3. Put together profiles of typical users (called “personas”) and design for these. Develop starting pages for each and determine how they will use the system. Remember to create personas for the average user and users who will find new interfaces difficult, not just the “power user”.
4. Governance is important: who is leading the project; who is overseeing the content for the various areas; what protocols (if any) should be followed. Again, it is a good idea to set this up early. Remember to consider different points of view within your organization.
5. Every organization starts out wanting Google, but soon abandons the idea when they find it doesn’t work. While Google is very good for finding things on the web that you are not sure exist, it is not so good at pinpointing a specific document you know exists on your network. People are not patient enough to wade through screens of search results. The search vendor/development industry is in a state of exciting change. Some search vendors are delving into the world of searching “unstructured content” to achieve these results. Still others claim that all content, no matter what, has some type of structure, even if it is just grammatical sentence structure. Many have developed amazing search tools, but the cost can be very high for a smaller organization. Again, it is necessary to give some advance thought as to what is really needed.
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