
What Flavour is Your Intranet?
At the IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen earlier this year, the ever-popular debate about how much news should feature on your intranet homepage was given another outing. There are other variants such as “who should own the intranet?” and “should we have one intranet or several?”.
Like relatives at Christmas, these pop up periodically, hang around too long and leave you with a headache.
One of the reasons these debates recur is that there is no simple answer: it depends on the flavour of your intranet, the clarity of your vision. Good intranets are distinctive; like flavour they emphasise some elements over others to reflect the strategic priorities of an organisation. Without this, the intranet is bland – a little of everything, but unless you have huge resources, the intranet is unlikely to do anything particularly well. Over time, too, the emphasis might change. So an intranet may inititlaly focus on communication but later move on to emphasise the collaboration element.
Here are some examples:
Organisation Need | Intranet Flavour | Approach |
Work effectively across silos | Collaboration Owner: HR IT |
|
Reduce operating costs | Services Owner: Finance |
|
Build a stronger culture – “One Company” initiatives | Communication Owner: Comms Corp Affairs |
|
Support flexible working | Digital Workplace Owner: HR |
|
So should there be lots of space given over to news on the homepage? If the flavour is ‘Communication’ then yes, but if you have other goals, then it may be time for news to take a back seat.
[This blog post was originally published as an article on the IntraTeam website]