Tips for Improving Your Intranet Incrementally

10 ways to continuously improve your intranet: A solid article from the folks at Step Two filled with some good advice. This bit, in particular, rings very true.

The biggest hurdle to creating an effective intranet is the belief that an intranet can be, or needs to be, ‘fixed’ in one go. A redesign project can never meet the needs of the entire organisation at one time. Meeting these needs takes time, as ongoing effort is required to build the intranet into an valuable business tool.

Remember that incremental improvements do make a difference, and that each improvement builds upon previous achievements. Be patient and educate your users and stakeholders that the intranet requires continuous improvement to remain relevant and effective.

Some more good advice about search analytics analysis.

Another great way to improve findability of intranet content is to set up a failed search terms report. This report lists all the words or phrases entered by users that bring back no results. Run the report each month and look for terms that users are regularly entering. Investigate whether the searches failed because of incomplete metadata or because the content does not exist.

In general, search analytics are ignored far too much. There are entire books written on the topic, and nothing on your intranet comes closer to fulfilling John Batelle’s vision of “The Database of Intentions” more than the record of what your users are searching for.

Finally, I see more need for authoring skills on intranets that perhaps anything else, so here’s some more good advice.

[…] authors do not always have the online writing skills to effectively communicate their expertise and knowledge.

This is where the intranet team can play a key role, by helping authors to identify the right content to place online, and write the content so it answers common staff questions.