Canon Australia Case Study: No Global Home Page

Intranet redesign for Canon Australia: A detailed case study on the analysis phase behind an intranet redesign from the experts at Step Two. One thing in particular jumped out as interesting.

Possibly the biggest departure from ‘traditional’ intranet design was the elimination of the corporate home page for iCON.

Instead of one home page for all users, the new Canon intranet will introduce a form of tactical personalisation, so that the My department page (see Figure 2) acts as a home page for each user.

[…] The reason for this design is to eradicate the turf wars that are fought over intranet home page real estate. Each division of the company, and each special project and initiative, battle it out to promote their wares.

This takes the most common model a step further. On intranets I’ve worked on, you have a global home page, and then individual department pages in addition to that. It’s an interesting model to bypass the consolidated home page all together. Apparently, global company news only exists as a sidebar on the department pages.

The one thing I wonder about is that this strategy requires all users to have a department home page. Do they? Often, I see departments like Facilities or Mail Operations operating without an intranet presence. So what do these users see? Do you “roll them up” to their next largest containing department that does have a page? Or do you have a “fall back” page that users without a department intranet presence see when they log on?