Shaping a poor man's portal

Developing internal media for the banking industry is no fun at the moment, not at all. Medium term investements, even if their benefits are obvious, are cancelled if there is no plainly positive business case for the first year.

That's a common problem for now; so should we get used to it or should we try to wait for better times? One big problem, I guess, is that most of us did probably already wait for a few months or even a year: things have been slowing down before, thorough planning and 100% budget compliant planning were some of the biggest slowdown factors up to now.

So now I'm about to plan a redesign of a ten year old intranet that should not produce any costs, should not require too many emergency workarounds, should be manageable for average-skilled editors and should attempt to satisfy those need, that we identified as the drivers for a 1 Mio € project.

Sounded disgusting in the beginning. Now I think it sounds interesting. There is no other choice anyway.

Centralized vs. Decentralized Intranets

The challenge I have to face currently, is to convince senior management (board level) that their own ideas are right. They are in fact: They want to harmonize their current intranets and replace these homegrown 10 year old solutions through a new state of the art platform.
Sounds simple: replace ten times operating and development costs through one, harmonize ten scattered editorial processes into one, gain efficiency, control, power, quality and security.

Maybe too simple: Nobody dares to really decide this issue. We are spending weeks and months in discussions, considerations, alternatives, business cases and evaluations.

There are tons of measurable advantages for intranets, ROI calculation is not an issue. But business cases for online media are never a matter of figures only – they are also a matter of belief. I never saw a business case that could not be torn into pieces using quite the same facts, but different assumptions.
How to measure efficiency in terms of fast and straight ahead publication, how to make sure that all relevant facts are considered, how to exclude known excuses?
That are just the common problems in creating business cases, but I feel that they are extremely annoying and especially their solution is becoming actually counter-productive if it deals with so obvious issues such as centralized vs. decentralized intranets?
Or can somebody please tell me something else?

What are intranets actually good for? ( they are your identity)

What is an intranet actually good for? - Well besides the fact that it is an invaluable tool, often the only or the most reliable source of information and a very cheap and efficient media, what – this is a very fashionable question, what problems does it solve for the enterprise?

• It is cheap and fast
• it provides many possibilities for control (if you really want to act out on that):who may see what when, who has read what when, when will what informationbe spread etc.
• its your voice – and if its done smart, it is the company voice – nobody else can talk to that wide range of employees.

The whole thing influences the image, the idea your employees have of your company – its not only the content, its rather the processes, the roles- and permission-management, the authoring policies that shape your employees perception.
so its not only a business tool (actually most intranets are not – they are just heading there), but it is the best communication media to deliver your vision and mission, your internal brand, the real company identity you have in your mind

I dont think these topics are important to determine whether you should have an intranet or not (does anybody seriously want to ask that question?). But it may help to keep them in mind, if youre considering how to do your intranet, how to address certain issues.

You cant tell people that your company is open minded and visionary, if your intranet is centrally run, publishes strictly business information only and spreads the look and feel and the usability on an early 1990s prototype.
You cant asko people to relate the fancy ads you are running to their everyday work life, if their daily work environment is so not fancy at all.
And you cant expect people to participate in anythoing, if you dont build your intranet for openness, communication, interactivity. This has to be done very dilitgently – you really need to know what you are doing and you need to invest a lot of thought in the processes in order to create a good experience for your people.

Get some experts, listen to their recommendations and let them go ahead. Dont try to follow the Ive read there something approach – your intranet is too valuable for that. It is your identity.