What is currently your greatest Intranet Challenge?

[paulag]

Now that we've entered a time where almost every company at least has some type of Intranet...I thought I'd throw out the following question to generate some discussion:

What is currently your greatest Intranet challenge?

Is it related to support? teamwork? technology? business users? political climate of your organization? content?

[tbonnemann]

I am sure there are examples that do a better job, but for one of the intranets that I'm aware of and that I currently work with (fairly large at >10K users) two of the main problems seem to be:

(1) finding relevant information (search) and
(2) having that information current (up-do-dateness).

[Goodyear]

There have been two recent redesigns of the intranet's home page (we call the intranet GO); the last expanded the news content into four categories, and simplified menus/navigation and, according to usability testing, significantly improved the user perception of value. The biggest challenge is letting potential users, or less-frequent users, know of the improvements to the tool; right beside that issue is improving global content, especially user participation.
We're working with IT ( a terrific working relationship) to add more user tools -- we recognize that news alone isn't going to cut it in the long term.
So, it's this expansion of usage that takes center stage. Without that, we have no data about GO's reach -- and we find it hard to convince execs that "people really use GO." Even though we list the usage expansion as most urgent, we've got a track record: 11 percent increase in visits since May -- our last redesign.
BTW, we use Teamsite and Interwoven for content management...

Sean
Internal Communication Manager
www.goodyear.com

[forum_user]

With respect to inspiring employees to use an intranet, intranet applications such as an online phone book are often popular. Employees might also welcome a simple application for reserving conference rooms in each of the company's locations.

Various service departments in your company can provide information that is desired by other employees in the company, too. For example, if the Human Resources Dept can provide online versions of insurance forms and information about employee benefits, etc, on the intranet, many employees are likely to visit those pages too. If you have a company library/information center, they could provide pages with an organized set of links to internet sites that contain information that is especially useful to people in your industry.

[dianeh]

Our Intranet will be two years old in January, and is definitely becoming a more relied-upon information source. We are fortunate that upper management has taken a "by the people, for the people" stance and let a team of representative employees construct this site. This has proven to be very successful with respect to creativity and strategy.

However, our folks are somewhat guilty of being stuck in a rut when it comes to using non-electronic, previous or more comfortable methods of accessing and sharing information. They are reluctant to step out of their comfort zone and make the site their central source for accessing and sharing information—most especially our sales and product groups. Our HR department has done a fabulous job of providing their forms, benefits, policies and procedures via the Intranet—even requiring our users to get that information from the site rather than via e-mail.

We've tried various approaches with our non-contributing groups such as monthly e-mail requests for content and even quarterly face-to-face meetings where they have the opportunity to verbally provide content suggestions/updates. A few realize the value and do their best to set an example, but it is a slow and painful process. There have even been occasions where I (Web Administrator) read newsworthy items that have been submitted to external publications but were not provided internally for publication on our Web site or Intranet. UGH!

We've created a couple of specialty areas on site—a Sales Lounge, which is a "one-stop shopping" area with links to sales- and product-related info only, as well as a weekly "What's New" page with links for all content added within the previous week (and so far we have had multiple new submissions on a weekly basis).

In summary, our biggest challenge is getting our sales and product teams to see the value and the potential the site has to offer and begin using it to that potential.

[Cheryl Becker]

Definitely for us search is the greatest challenge. Current content is second, however, my team and our site owners try to keep up with that.

We enable our non-IT depts to own their own sites and contribute their own content, so that it is their responsibility to keep info current. It can be a trick to keep everyone trained (some are better than others), but I think having site contributors is better than IT being a 'bottle-neck' in publishing.

It is very important to have upper management support your Intranet. Our management is very supportive. I keep a spreadsheet that tracks hard-dollar savings to prove the Intranet's worth.

Our Intranet is about 6 years old. At first no one was actively meeting with departments to brainstorm sites. After we started actively advertising the Intranet, it was fun to watch the mind-set of the company change from 'send it to the printer' to 'get this online'.

[sheldon]

Our greatest challenge in building an extranet was getting our developers to document what they were going to do. And also providing enough detail in what we were asking for so as not to leave any room for errors in the development proccess

In fact i was employed in my current position, having a technical background to interoperate what the developers were saying and to supply a detailed functional specification document

This has become a solid fundation of a client/developer relationship.

Ineffective functional specification for Web projects such as Web sites, Intranets or Portals contribute largely to delays, higher costs or in applications that do not match the expectations. Independent if the Web site, Intranet or Portal is custom developed or built on packaged software such as Web-, enterprise content management or portal software, the functional specification sets the foundation for project delays and higher costs. To limit delays and unexpected investments during the development process, the following pitfalls should be avoided:

Too vague or incomplete functional specification

Future site enhancement not identified or not communicated:

Planned functionality not aligned with internal resources:

Wish lists versus actual needs and business requirements: The functional specification is not aligned with user’s needs or business requirements.

Not enough visual supports or purely text based: Textual description of Web applications can be interpreted subjectively and hence leading to wrong expectations.

[pink_flamingo]

http://www.wgint.com

Six years ago, the challenge was to get people to use it. They didn't understand and thought it would just go away. It was held together with baling wire and twine.

Four years ago they started catching on and thought everything should look like cnn.com or msn.com, etc. Because they knew how to navigate those sites.

Three years ago we did a major redesign and found everyone had an opinion. We don't lack for content but we do lack for content managers. Developers aren't intended to manage content!

Two years ago we started looking at new hardware and the ability to handle active input. We were now behind the times. Everyone had an opinion on how we should proceed.

This spring we purchased all new hardware including load balancers and multimedia servers. We are intending to totally scrap our intranet and use only The Washington Way Virtual Office (extranet.) This is only a stop-gap measure until we move to Oracle Portal.

The biggest challenge from the beginning until this very moment has been ownership. {{deep sigh}} Ownership lies somewhere among Corporate Communications, Business Development, Information Technology and the site owner/sponsor.

The intranet never did just go away.