Special Series: Taming the Intranet Beast, Part Five
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Part Five: the Intranet Dream Team
In the final instalment of a five-part series on Taming the Intranet Beast, senior consultant Denise Eisner shows how the dream team can be realized, even in times of austerity.
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s list of best Intranets of 2012 suggests that proper resourcing for an organization’s internal web site needs to approach a ratio of one resource for every 1,000 employees. That figure takes into account some allowances for temporary outside help for particular functions, but on the whole, the ratio seems right.
But can smaller government departments today manage Intranets with one, two, or three individuals? The answer is a qualified yes, depending whether:
- The individual/team member has the requisite communications, marketing, analytics and business skills to multi-task effectively;
- The web content lifecycle has been defined and informs what happens to web content from inception to removal;
- Governance is in place to make strategic decisions;
- Tactical decisions are made within the Intranet team;
- The design, structure, functionality and performance measurement components of site management are managed centrally; and
- Content contributors are relied upon as local editors providing story ideas and web content, not as web experts.
How could these activities be realized when budgets are tight, and likely to get tighter? Consider the future state of a departmental Intranet if nothing changes:
- Employees waste 90 cents per minute looking for content on a poorly structure site;
- New content costing upwards of $800-1000 per page (after writing, approvals and publishing) keeps getting adding to the site with no strategy or lifecycle guidance governing its existence; and
- There is a risk of limited understanding among employees of the department’s top priorities since they are not effectively messaged using the channels that employees want and need.
Given these direct and indirect costs to the organization, maintaining a status quo for the Intranet will cost more, and the performance records should bear that out. A well-conceived resourcing solution plus efforts to shore up governance and strategy offers senior management a more cost-efficient and sustainable approach to managing the Intranet channel.
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