Pat’s Point of View

After an embarrassingly long time, I have finally finished a case study of an intranet redesign project I did for Canon more than a year ago.

This project highlighted that intranets do not need to be structured in the ‘traditional’ way (ie like public websites).

Instead of a single home page and a rigid view of the site, a fresh approach was taken, and the information architecture for [this intranet] makes use of personalisation to efficiently meet the needs of Canon staff.

Lastly, it is worth noting that the information architecture techniques devised for websites apply equally to intranets, sometimes more so. This is a key lesson for experienced information architecture practitioners.

Continuing my ‘exclusive tips’ for those who read my blog, what you won’t read much about in the article is the intranet alignment workshop we ran.

In any organisation, there are many stakeholders who are involved in the design or management of the intranet. The first challenge confronting many intranet projects therefore becomes to create a common vision for the intranet, to align the many stakeholders, and to define the role that each stakeholder will play.

Ask anyone who has worked in a large organisation on a website or intranet project, and they will tell you that getting management buy-in can be very difficult. Political battles over ownership of the site, and thus over its redesign, are commonplace. And without some early alignment and consensus, trying to get approval for design ideas later on can be heartbreaking.

Just a half-day workshop, held after some initial needs analysis has been performed, can work wonders. Key stakeholders get their chance to give their input, they can see progress is being made, and as a group can discuss those things that are often assumed (like what is the intranet for?).

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