Top 10 ideas: Making the most of your corporate intranet
10. Run Survey / Poll
It’s quick and easy to do, launch regular survey to get user’s feedback on almost any subjects, for a change try to create survey outside corporate agenda, pick casual topic related to everyday life, political debate, sustainability issue, or entertainments here are some ideas:
- Cool movie of the month
- Casual Friday? (yes no)
- Choose company smart phone? (iPhone or Blackberry)
- How do you travel to work?
- How’s your weekend?
- What do you think of Gordon Brown?
Survey and poll are easy to deploy
9. RSS feed
Embedding relevant RSS feed to departmental page is one of the easiest ways to get fresh news delivered to your page. RSS news from HSE (Health & Safety Executive can be added to the corporate Health & Safety Page, or an RSS from popular design blog is perfectly suitable for Creative department homepage for instance. It’s not only help member of your department aware of what’s going on out there it also help staff from other department know more about what you’re doing.
The North Face Intranet homepage with RSS and Video cast
8. Enable commenting
Everyone likes commenting. Sometime reading people’s comments in a blog is more interesting than the actual post itself. We want to hear what people say at the same we like to be heard. Staff’s comments can be invaluable to the improvement of the business and organisation as a whole. In Claromentis commenting can be enabled for documents, news, and publish pages.
News article with comments
7. Classifieds (Craigslist)
Have you ever noticing communal pin board next to the kitchen is full of classifieds, from selling used car, sharing apartments to cheap concert tickets. Having an electronic version of classifieds right in the corporate intranet can help users coming back to the system. If you still like the pin board, you can print it out of your intranet and post it there!
Classifieds
6. Treasure Hunt
Yes a treasure hunt. Simply hide content within the corporate intranet and run a competition to find it. One of our clients had tried this and it was a success. It’s definitely a fun and exciting way to get users familiarising with the intranet without a boring training.
Prize winner for the intranet treasure hunt
5. Business Dashboard
Businesses are surrounded with data; but they are sharing one common problem. They are not visual enough to draw our attention. Claromentis dashboard application allows you to generate data visualisation in a form of graph / chart from any data source as long as they are accessible. This can be business statistics, KPI (Key Performance Index), weekly sales figures, real-time number of visitors, stock chart, and much more.
TSG Intranet with business dashboard
4. Up-to-date Content
The essence of a corporate Intranet is storing and finding information, if users can’t find information they want accurately & effortlessly, it almost guarantee that they won’t coming back. The reality is always harder than theory but you can’t underestimate the importance of having the most up-to-date information on the Intranet.
"Content is King"
3. Develop Persona while improving usability
Check your stats & analytics, ask users and identify 3 main areas which are frequently visited on the Intranet. Create attractive shortcuts to access these areas and you are developing persona at the same time improving usability of your corporate intranet.
IPO Intranet homepage with 6 big buttons
2. Implement built-in apps
Claromentis offers business-ready built-in applications which can be implemented straight within a corporate Intranet. These applications include room booking, image gallery, holiday & vacation planner, group calendars, forums and course planner.
Image Gallery application - Care UK Intranet
1. Business processes
Having your business process built right into the corporate intranet is the number on the list. It transforms corporate intranet into something much more than just communication & collaboration platform. The intranet becomes an indispensible business application where day-to-day business processes sit on top of information layer in a single integrated system. Claromentis provides several products such as Process Manager, Sales Manager and Project Manager all can be implemented directly within your Intranet.
Claromentis Project Manager
Have you tried one of these within your corporate Intranet ? Please share your experience.
Very informative article on intranet! Intranet sure is a boom for organizations and if used with its full capability, helps saving lots of money and time.
@Hashim
Thanks Hashim, I hope the article is useful for you.
Here is a thought for you regarding #8 Enable Commenting. Many years ago, when I was with a different company, I had responsibility for both Internet and Intranet sites. I felt that an open policy on commenting would be beneficial to our culture (making us more close knit). As you can imagine, I had major push back from the other executives. While I was able to get a pilot program going, it wasn’t long until we had our first “Employee Complaint”. I was immediately asked to remove the comment feature, which I thought would have been disasterous to labor/management relations. So, I came up with a plan to allow all to make comments, then like a radio-station 7 second delay – we could review to determine whether to post publicly. Now, that’s nothing new. In fact, once people catch on to censoring – it could be worse than if you had just removed the ability to comment. Here’s what we did that made it work – we made it so that regardless of management’s decision on whether to post publicly – the comment would appear, as if it was there for everyone, for the original comment maker. This has been in place for nearly a decade and worked like a charm!
@Mobile Application Software
What if an employee asked another employee did they see their comment and it was not visiable to the other employee, what would you do then?