Congratulations on completing your intranet review! You may now have a list of prioritised actions, which you have gathered through reviewing your intranet content, stakeholder interviews, surveys and site statistics. You have an active and supportive network of intranet contributors and your intranet sponsor is expecting an update following your review. Now what?
Your intranet review may have generated a range of software, content and usability issues and its important that you take time to evaluate this information and revisit your intranet mission and objectives. Has your organisational expectations of the intranet changed? Do your intranet objectives need updating? Has the way in which your organisation uses the intranet changed?
Considerations:
When it comes to compiling your recommendations some useful points to consider are how much, time, money and effort will it take to get to where you want to be. You also need sight of the wider corporate objectives and consider the longevity of your intranet platform.
Intranet Options:
If your intranet mission and objectives are still valid after your intranet review you have 3 options open to you:
- Do nothing, keep going with your intranet as is
- Refresh your existing intranet
- Renew/replace your intranet
Option 1: Do nothing.
If colleagues have engaged with you and taken time to provide feedback, you have a responsibility to take this feedback onboard and act upon it. If you go with this option, time, effort and money outputs are low, but your engagement rates may start to decline and your content editors could slowly become despondent. More importantly, if your colleagues can’t get the intranet to do what they need it to do, they may go elsewhere for alternatives, creating additional content silos outside of the corporate intranet. Doing nothing with your intranet review feedback is not recommended.
Option 2: Refresh your existing intranet platform.
If you are considering refreshing your intranet, you need to be aware of your intranet software capabilities and the impact of any changes in terms of development time, costs and time to implement. It maybe that all you require is an additional application to plug into your current solution that solves an issue. It maybe that some bespoke development is required. Will refreshing your intranet enhance your platform’s longevity or are you just delaying the inevitable larger project? Sometimes the initial cost to refresh is small and therefore a big financial advantage, but sometimes the hidden development costs soon add up.
Option 3: Renew/replace your intranet platform.
Your intranet review, may well have identified some fundamental issues with your current intranet platform. It maybe that all things considered you are going to recommend compiling a business case to replace your intranet as your next step. It maybe that after further investigation, you don’t need to replace your entire intranet, but part of it. Before you submit your intranet review findings, you might want to download our business case template to start thinking about your next step.
Over the coming weeks we will be looking at how you kickstart your intranet project. If you are not sure what the best way forward is, why not book a 30 minute consultation with our intranet expert Martyn Green, who has extensive industry experience.
Here at SORCE we’ve experienced hundreds of intranets of all shapes and sizes and are skilled at helping uncover opportunities to improve engagement and business processes.
As intranet software providers our software powers the intranet and extranet for hundreds of organisations. Our clients cover a wide range of sectors from finance to manufacturing, not for profit organisations (such as charities and housing associations) as well as local authorities and other public sector agencies.
Find out more about our intranet software package or call us on 01635 551777.
