6 tips for intranet teams

Mobile and social concepts and technologies are rapidly redefining knowledge work and transforming our digital work environments, including intranets. Intranets will be transformed into a set of of services that provide relevant capabilities to people in different situations.

1. Make sure you have defined a mission for your intranet, stating whom it is there to serve, in what ways, and how. The only purpose of an intranet is to serve employees in different ways. If it doesn't, it has no reason for existence.
2. Avoid giving your intranet a name. As soon as you start talking about an intranet as it has a life of its own, you are going astray.
3. Don't think of the intranet in terms of pages. Think of the intranet as a collection of services that you provide to employees. These services can take have many different shapes and forms, and employees can interact with them in various ways and in different situations.
4. Don't think of the intranet as a destination. Information work is something people do, not a place. The intranet should always be within the employees' reach, wherever and whenever they might need it.
5. Focus on improving ways of working instead of rolling out solutions and features. Your work doesn't end when the intranet has been built, deployed and rolled out to the employees - that's when the real work starts.
6. Introduce any changes to ways of working step by step, in a continuous flow. Not only will employees it enable people to adopt and integrate the changes into their daily work, but they will get used to change, expect change, become comfortable it, and eventually make sure that it happens by themselves.