Intranet is firmly making its place in companies now. Using an intranet, a company can increase its efficiency and productivity, share information seamlessly, and save a vast amount of time. However, to achieve these benefits, an intranet needs a clear and effective strategy that aligns with the organisation’s goals. You can follow these steps to align your intranet strategy with your business goals:
- Conduct a Situational Analysis
This step involves the analysis of the existing state of your brand and the intranet. You need to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of both. You can create surveys and feedback forms or conduct interviews to collect reviews from the users and decision-makers in your organisation. While researching, you can also look for benchmarks for your intranet tool, compare it with the industry standards, and check whether it fits in the picture.
- Define Your Intranet Vision and Mission
This involves articulating the overall direction and value proposition of your intranet. The vision of your intranet should clarify what you want it to be in the future. Your intranet mission must also clearly state what it does and for whom. For example, in the case of the software part, you can first book an intranet free demo to thoroughly test the tool and check if it goes with your mission. Or, in case of creating an inter-connected mesh of your computers, make sure to deliver your mission and vision to each user. This would help them understand how to use your intranet.
- Set Your Intranet Okrs
A business goal is any goal that helps move an organisation toward a desired result. According to HubSpot, a goal should be SMART, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Setting specific and measurable goals for your intranet can also support your business goals. You can use the OKR framework to set your intranet goals, which include Objectives and Key Responsibilities. Here, objectives define what you want to achieve, while key responsibilities are the indicators you will use to monitor your progress. For example, let’s say your objective is improving customer satisfaction, and your intranet objective is improving internal communications and eliminating silos among your teams. In such a case, your key responsibilities can look like reducing the email volume by 25%, growing intranet usage by 40%, and improving employee satisfaction by up to 15%.
- Establish Your Intranet Governance
This involves defining the policies, processes, roles, and responsibilities for managing your intranet. You must define who will own, sponsor, lead, support, and use your intranet. You also need to establish how you will create, approve, publish, update, archive, and delete content on your intranet. Lastly, you also need to determine the parameters you will use to keep the quality, accessibility, compliance, etc., of your intranet in check.
- Develop Your Intranet Roadmap
This involves planning the actions and milestones for implementing and maintaining your intranet. You also need to prioritise features and functionalities of your intranet based on their impact and feasibility. Developing an intranet roadmap will make it easier to plan and prepare to overcome any challenge in your business and ensure things go smoothly at each step.
For each step above, you need to allocate a specific budget and resources. But don’t move ahead with your roadmap just like that. Try soliciting feedback from the company’s decision-makers as well as end users on your plan.
A Quick Summary
The above points describe how you can create an intranet strategy that complements your business goals and aligns with them. By following the steps above, you can make crafting an intranet strategy to offer value to your organisation significantly easier and smoother. Having a robust intranet strategy in hand allows you to improve the user experience and engagement while also fulfilling all of their requirements. Above all, having a well-defined intranet strategy has the potential to put your brand on the road to success.