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Intranet Web Publishing© 2010 Max Lent
One of my most successful projects was destroyed because of a marketing manager’s desire to control every word and image published to our corporate intranet. The argument that convinced executives to allow marketing to take over our internet was that the 1,100 internal Web sites did not look the same as our Internet Web site and that there was no graphic design standardization. The argument was true, but irrelevant. In fact, having the corporate intranet look like the corporate Internet Web site was confusing to employees and executives. The takeover eventually failed on several levels. Employees need to have control of the information that they publish on their intranet. Without having direct and easy access to controlling their content and even the look and feel of their intranet Web sites, they lose interest in Web publishing. Having to pass all information through a gatekeeper causes delays and frustrations which results in less information being published. Employees browsing the corporate intranet often have trouble telling where they are browsing. This was and remains a huge problem for many Internet users including IT savvy college students. The biggest issue facing the company when the intranet was co-opted by the marketing department was getting employees to publish current information to the Web, not the color of their banners. It is very difficult to convince overworked employees to take on the task of publishing new Web content when they are not allocated time or rewarded for their efforts. Our team was successful at encouraging departments to publish mission critical information and we proved that the information was being used through log statistics. Our secret was making their Web sites theirs. It is ironic that the manager responsible to dissembling our success is now a manager in a Web 2.0 company that specializes in giving customers the tools to customize the company’s products. If I were currently tasked with building a corporate intranet content management system, I would be using Adobe’s Contribute product http://www.adobe.com/products/contribute/ to manage a corporate intranet. This product enables the creation of a uniform corporate internet with a standardized look and feel while enabling individual content publishers complete control over their content. Elsewhere, I have said that I would introduce a Wiki into a corporate intranet. Introducing Contribute and Wiki at the same time would create more than one way to create content. The Contribute model is to broadcast information that is not editable by information consumers. The Wiki model enables the corporate community to collaboratively create and edit documents. When HR publishes a vacation time off policy, they need to inform the entire company of that policy. The policy is not available for employee modification. This is a job for Contribute. When a product or process user manual is being created, all input is valued and encouraged. This is a Wiki type of project. The goal is to open channels of communication to employees and departments that are easy to use, simple to understand, and generate value for the company. It is faster and cheaper for an employee to look up something on their intranet than for them to call another employee. However, if an employee searches the intranet and can’t find what they are looking for, calling would have been cheaper in the first place. The secret is to allocate resources to building a content rich intranet by empowering employees to publish and offering incentives that creates more content.
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©1995- 2010 Max Lent
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