What does an intranet strategy look like?
Sometimes there are postings on intranet discussion forums where people say “I’ve been asked to write an intranet strategy and was hoping I could have a look at somebody else’s”.
To me that’s a little like saying “I’m planning to have a really enjoyable holiday and was hoping I could come on yours”. Although seeing what somebody else does can be useful to get ideas, it is unlikely to be a good fit to your particular requirements.
Indeed, although the ‘strategy’ word is commonly used, I don’t think I’ve ever seen two intranet strategies that look the same. Sometimes when I ask about an intranet strategy, what I’m actually shown is a governance document, but these are not the same: governance is about managing operations; strategy is about setting a trajectory.
So while I can’t give you a recipe for an intranet strategy, there are certain questions that a good strategy should answer:
1. Vision or Purpose: What is the intranet for?
This innocuous-looking question can be hard to answer, but if you can get all your stakeholders to agree on this, then it stops an intranet programme being pulled in multiple directions.
Many strategies seem to state the blandly obvious, such as “To help Grotco communicate, collaborate and work more effectively”. The acid test is: given two otherwise equal options, does the vision guide you on which route to take? See my earlier post on What flavour is your intranet?
2. Goals : What are the 4-5 main things that the intranet will do in the future?
This is where the intranet strategy should take a lead from an organisations’ strategy. So if your organisation aims to improve customer satisfaction, then a strong goal would show how the intranet could play a part in that: finding experts to solve problems, better tracking of issues to resolution or providing more accurate information to sales teams, for example.
Some goals may be more inward-looking, such as ensuring 99% of employees can access the intranet. These are worth tracking, but won’t excite anyone, and may be better under “Implementation” (see below)
3. Measures: What indicates that goals are being met?
It is tempting to tie intranet measures to whatever your analytics tool will tell you. ‘Hits’ can be useful, but only if your strategy says what questions you want the data to answer. For a full picture, measure both inputs to the process (e.g. how many sales people use the information on the intranet) and the outcomes that matter (e.g. how often did the intranet play a role in improving customer satisfaction?).
4. Implementation: What will change in the next 1-3 years?
This section talks about how goals will be met and may be a very high-level summary of a project plan or roadmap. A fundamental decision is breadth vs depth – do you try to get all of your people using your intranet some of the time, or focus on core users and depth of support? More on this in a future post.
Implementation should also say how adoption and culture issues might be addressed.
Once you’ve decided these things, I’ll be happy to tell you all about my recent holiday.
[This blog post was originally published as an article on the IntraTeam website]
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