ANALYSIS
If your organisation is like most, your intranet infrastructure was never a priority until it had already grown into a mess. The intranet wasn't a planned addition to the network. It grew out of a hodgepodge of Web applications that were added together without regard for the kind of technology supporting the application or its location.
However, one day someone looks up and acknowledges the huge mess that's been created because no one can find anything they want. There are a dozen or more servers, each with its own specialised purpose, that infrequent users can never remember how to find. Someone finally stands up and says that you have to clean up this mess. That's a great idea, but how do you do it?
Understand what you're building
The first key to cleaning up your particular intranet mess is to understand exactly what you're being asked to build. Intranets mean different things to different organisations, and even to different people within the same organisation. Before you begin to build the unifying pieces that bring your intranet together, you need to know which of these models best fits your intranet needs:
A dashboard for the corporation -- is the core of your intranet designed to bring together reporting numbers from various Web-based systems into one dashboard where management can see how the company is doing at a glance?
Dashboard for internal applications -- is your intranet site simply navigation for getting to all of the internal Web applications that have proliferated over the past several years?
File repository -- is it a file repository that is designed to replace or supplement your existing file servers? File-based intranets allow for more categorisation of files and more regimented tagging of files, but the increased organisation may be resisted by users.
Collaboration -- if you have teams of people who need to share calendars, to-do lists, or project plans, you'll have a site that focuses on the collaborative opportunities of an intranet. This type of foundation most highly values the ability for groups to maintain their own rapidly changing information.
Corkboard -- some organisations use the intranet as a virtual corkboard. It's a place where the human resources department can place notices about changes to health benefits, for example. Some extend this concept further, allowing anyone who has something to say to post a note on the intranet.
