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 Very
much like organizing a real-world junk drawer, the first thing
you need to do is dump all the contents on the floor and start
throwing out the things you no longer need. This part is painful
and tedious, but absolutely necessary to getting things under
control. You can either take on this task yourself or delegate
it to all the groups publishing to your intranet. Go page
by page through your site and document the page topic, who
owns it, whether it’s still relevant and when it was
last updated. A spreadsheet is a great way to document this
information, since you can easily sort it in a variety of
ways.
Now that you’ve separated the relevant material from
the junk, you can work with IT and the departments involved
to start cleaning up the clutter. This step alone can often
deliver pretty impressive results. Once you have got the initial
list in place, keep it up to date regularly and going through
the process will be easier and easier.
Organizing Your Intranet
Well-organized, intuitive intranets are organized according
to how employees intuitively think about information—and
that very seldom matches either the org chart or how departments
and publishers think. Like it or not, this will probably result
in a major change in the way your intranet is organized. Don’t
fret. You don’t have to do it all at once. The first
step is to understand where you ultimately want to go so you
can start making changes to get there.
Information on an intranet typically can be broken down into
two major categories: content that is relevant to an individual
department and content that is relevant to the entire company.
Company-wide information should be the focus of your intranet,
as it relates to a greater number of employees.
Go back to the list you originally created (now blissfully
free of the unnecessary material) and add some items. Ask
the departments you’ve been working with to send you
a list of topics or tools that they are considering adding
to the intranet in the future. Include these items in your
list, noting that they are coming soon.
 Now
for the tricky part: Try to consolidate your list down to
40-50 broad categories of company-wide content. This will
probably mean consolidating two or three similar sections
of content into a single item. Do your best to come up with
a list that represents all the present and future intranet
developments.
Card-Sort Research
The next step is to understand how employees would organize
this information. The quickest, easiest way to do that is
card-sort research.
Take the new list you’ve created and transfer each
item to a uniquely numbered index card. You’ll have
a stack of 40-50 cards, each labeled with an item and a number.
Shuffle the deck to ensure that the cards are in no particular
order. Have 16 employees who represent a good cross section
of the roles, responsibilities and experience levels in your
company individually sort the deck into stacks of items they
think belong together. Once they’ve created the stacks
of related items, ask them to label each stack with 2-3 words
that they would use to describe the items contained. Record
the labels and the card numbers contained in each stack in
a spreadsheet. Be sure to reshuffle the deck between each
participant.
Based on your card-sort research, you should be able to quickly
categorize enterprise-wide information in a far more intuitive
manner that saves employees' time and frustration—which
ends up saving companies money over the long run, according
to a number of usability studies. It might also end up saving
you a lot of hassle the next time your company goes through
a major reorganization. User-driven navigation (which is often
based on topics instead of departments) usually stays the
same even when the structure of the company changes.
There are several other steps to take to clean up a messy
intranet, such as tackling your graphic standard and writing
style. But by starting with a common goal, relevant content
and clear organization, you’ll be well on your way to
an intranet that finally lives up to those original expectations.
Jerry Stevenson is a speaker, author and consultant with
a unique blend of communication and technology expertise.
A former columnist for the Ragan Report, he is co-author
of Ragan’s “Almanac of Top Intranets, 2003 edition.”
His clients include Sabre, Kimberly-Clark, Merck, Dell and
the American Heart Association. Jerry is a frequent lecturer
at IABC events around the world and was named 2003-2004 Dallas
IABC Communicator of the Year. Contact information, along
with more columns and presentations are available at stevensonconsulting.com.
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