Every time I speak to a company about the state of their Intranet, all issues seem to link back to one missing element - a robust and executable Intranet roadmap. I emphasize executable because so many roadmap and strategy documents contain such “blue sky” scenarios that they are largely useless to those stuck in reality. I’ve found that when these high-minded approaches are pitched to business units and groups within a company, one of two things happens: Those listening who don’t fully understand the implications of Intranet and information management are wonderstruck and veryexcited about the vision. Then, of course, they are disapointed, and the result is the Intranet management team loses both credibility and support across the business. Or, those listening do understand the implications of Intranet management, and know that that some of the scenarios described would take huge feats of re-engineering and information structure to achieve.
For example, at one company, a new “e-learning” initiative was being proposed. The picture was painted of a new portlet (of course) that would dynamically surface learning material and opportunities that were directly related to the work the employee was doing at the time. So, if the employee was faced with a challenging customer, learning modules on handling challenging customers would suddenly appear in the Portal. If the employee was having trouble with a colleague, learning modules on troublesome colleagues would also appear. Or, perhaps a developer is stuck on a bug. She immediately sees a debugging class is available online in that language. How fantastical! To point out the realities behind such visions, we worked backwards from the end scenario and broke the vision into related events, then linked them to actual information flows into the Portal. After we saw how just the learning content alone would have to be managed, tagged and standardized to achieve even part of that vision, the proponents became a bit more humble in their approach to e-learning.
All this is not to say that visions of future states are not a good idea. Everyone gets excited when viewing mockups and scenarios. However, these scenarios always need to be grounded in reality. Bottom line is, a good roadmap or strategy document comes with explicit “how to” steps on how this roadmap is going to be achieved. Anything less and it’s just Powerpoint practice.
Anyway, what I was going to blog about initially was an idea we are working on for a standardized method of collecting information to feed an initial Intranet roadmap document. Every company is different, and every situation unique, but in interviewing folks about the state of their Intranet, I ask a set of questions that are pretty much the same: How big is the company, what’s the employee breakdown like? Who works from home? Who’s using laptops/desktops? What’s the current brand strategy all about? How to describe the corporate culture? What is the current content management situation? Who authors? Who shouldn’t author? What are the pain points? (other than search, naturally!), How do you find out what the pain points are? Who is handling support/feedbacK? What’s the IT/hosting relationship like? Who can set up servers and new sites? And so on - so we’re working on an easy questionnaire to kick off the development of a roadmap. It’s a good way to help folks to think about the issues that they should be thinking about when they think about their Intranet! (chuck wood).
