Introduction

A good corporate intranet should operate as an organization's invisible underpinning, providing the information which enables staff to carry out their daily work without having to think about it. At its best, it is an online world replacing the staff handbook, noticeboard, coffee machine conversation, induction pack and hundreds of individual transactions which once used to take place face to face. However, as organizations are imperfect, so often are their intranets. Too frequently organizations leave their intranet management to individuals or teams in IT, human resources (HR) or the press office, who have other priorities; or add its management to the work of those running the website, to which it always takes second place. The result is out-of-date pages which staff rarely consult, an abundance of copies of corporate policies stored locally, and a daily e-mail correspondence between staff looking for information and provider departments, if indeed, the employee is lucky enough to know whom to consult.

Information professionals, skilled as they are in organizing information, and accustomed to providing the link between the work of the organization and the knowledge it needs, often make good intranet managers. In many cases, they are the only people with a ‘helicopter’ view of their entire organization and able to see informational needs beyond immediate business priorities. However, the intranet manager faces numerous challenges, ranging from inadequate technology to corporate politics, from a legacy of poor content to staff timidity or apathy. They have to balance the needs of different departments with different agendas and levels of influence within the business at the same time as obeying Ranganathan’s fundamental law to ‘save the time of the reader’. This chapter's author has years of experience tackling such issues for a large law firm. However, his advice should be relevant to information professionals taking on the management of intranets of all sizes, in organizations of all types.

The corporate intranet

Many corporate information professionals are involved with the management and development of their organization's intranet. Far from being an easy undertaking, it is one of the most challenging roles within an organization. This is because intranets are used across organizations by individuals with different roles, different requirements and potentially different ways of accessing content and tools.

Intranet managers therefore need to have a good understanding of how the organization works.