Sam Marshall (@sammarshall), Director of ClearBox Consulting, has worked on intranets for 15+ years. He’s consulted on and benchmarked 60+ intranets. Along the way, he’s compiled a list of the five most common intranet mistakes.

Recently, Sam presented a DNN webinar titled "Achieve Intranet Success by Avoiding These Common Mistakes." In this post, I provide a summary of the webinar. Access our on-demand webinar page if you’d like to view the replay.

Here, according to Sam, are the five most common intranet mistakes.

1) Disappearing Sponsor

Note: Original cartoons commissioned by ClearBox from: Duncan Scott

Executive sponsors are critical to all projects: they provide funding, support and visibility within the executive ranks. When your intranet project involves change at a wide scale, "You can’t bring everyone on that journey at once, so it helps to have someone with enough influence that gets it early on, because they can help open doors."

While it’s important to find the right sponsor up front, Sam has been on projects where the sponsor was re-assigned or went on maternity leave. Without another sponsor ready and willing to assume the role, the intranet project ground to a halt.

How to avoid this mistake:

Identify and recruit 2-3 champions, rather than a single one. Multiple champions serve as an insurance policy against the disappearing sponsor. In addition, build a business case, even if you’re not asked for one. The business case should measure the "before," so that you can demonstrate the "after" (i.e. business impact).

2) Over-personalizing

Imagine walking into a supermarket and having ten pairs of hands shoved in your face with the food items the supermarket thinks you want to buy. Even if they got a few of the items correct, you’d probably get creeped out, leave the supermarket and try the one down the street.

The same applies to your intranet. Personalized content must feel natural and organic, not overdone. According to Sam, "If you personalize too much and people don’t understand the logic behind it, then it feels creepy." Like the supermarket analogy, it can make people disoriented and want to leave.

How to avoid this mistake:

Drive personalization based on explicit fields set by users in their profiles. For instance, when a user transfers from the London office to the one in Rome, she sets her location to Rome. Now, instead of seeing London-based offers, she’ll receive offers more relevant to her new location.

3) Carried Away with Design Principles

Sam noted that a lot of the Information Architecture (IA) planning for intranets happens via "card sorts." People write down (on cards) all of the different areas of an intranet, then group them in piles.

According to Sam, "One thing struck me doing card sorts: the received wisdom has always been that the intranet navigation shouldn't be like your org chart. The arguments being that new recruits won’t know it, and that organisations keep re-structuring so that your intranet structure would have to change too."

At the same time, however, there are always people in the organization for whom navigation by organization structure makes perfect sense. For instance, to find a document on paternity leave, where would you go? To the HR Department page, of course.

How to avoid this mistake:

Intranets should reflect how an organization works, which means that some of your intranet should look like your org chart. When organizing Department pages, however, structure content intelligently, as this chart shows:

4) Forgetting the Late Adopters

Referencing a model by Ryan & Goss from the 1940's, Sam highlighted an adoption curve, which starts with innovators and early adopters on the far left side, and late majority and laggards on the far right.

Innovators and early adopters like to use any sort of new technology. They like to feel exclusive and be seen as thought leaders. They may be using your intranet before you even announce it. No work was involved in getting them into the system. Each subsequent type of user, however, must be managed differently.

The early majority wants proven results, while the late majority is risk averse. Laggards, on the other hand, focus on risk above all else. If you think these late adopters will behave like your innovators, you’ll be in for a rude awakening.

How to avoid this mistake:

Don't rely on a business case that demands high adoption levels across the board. Instead, focus on specific communities of users at a time and grow from there.

5) Overzealous Intranet Governance

Sam once helped a client with an intranet governance document. At every meeting, they’d add more to the document. Before long, it had grown to over 100 pages. According to Sam, "You only need a 100 page governance document if you plan to hit somebody with it as a means of enforcement."

A 100-page governance document does not get read. And even if partially read, all it would do is stifle interest and activity in the intranet.

How to avoid this mistake:

Start by asking, "What are the five or six things that really matter on the intranet?" Use that as the basis for your governance document, if you have one at all. Governance is less about a set of rules and more about encouragement, modelling, conversation and changing behavior.

Sam's Presentation

Here is the slide deck Sam presented during his webinar. Enjoy.

Achieve Intranet Success by Avoiding These Common Mistakes from DNN