Making common content work on the intranet

The intranet comprises broadly of corporate and business common content. Corporate content are stuff such as backoffice processes, policies, templates, news, corporate events and employee benefits. Business content are stuff such as standard contract clauses, services & solutions offerings, project references, document deliverable templates, delivery samples and methodologies.

Regardless of the category, 5 things need to happen for an intranet to be a trusted place for staff to get common content. Common content needs to be:

• available as soon as they are
• at the right place
  
• well-written
• accurate, current and comprehensive
• rid of Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) content

Before I expand these points, I have to confess that I have problems with the terms Business Owner, Content Owner and Content Custodian. I meant for them to be the business representative who is responsible for sharing their content on the intranet. What would you call this person?

Available as soon as they are
We should aim to publish common content before any formal communication sessions. For instance, updating a process write-up and uploading new templates on the intranet before conducting training. The intranet team needs to proactively identify and cooperate with business owners to write and publish content. It's different from publishing content when they eventually become available.

Business owners seldom initiate content publishing. The pyramid below is a reflection on how much business owners depend on the intranet.

The intranet team has less to worry for business owners who position the intranet as necessary for communicating content. On the contrary, the challenge is real for staff who treat the intranet as supplementary or remain obscure to it. Business owners in the supplementary category will publish their content on the intranet nevertheless, but the speed in which they do so is worrying because staff who needs the content will have spend time looking for them before they are eventually published. This can discredit the intranet for not being able to keep up with the pace of the business and make staff distrust the intranet. For staff in the obscure category, it'll probably never come to mind that they can use the intranet for publishing - this is the most worrying.

How can we establish touch-points with these worrisome business owners? How do we discover them as they appear with new initiatives or changes? To help the intranet harvest common content and stay relevant with the business, here are some things that can be done:

• Participate in Senior Management meetings so that the intranet team can identify new initiatives and content
• Stay in touch with business owners to learn about the progress of their initiatives
  
• Participate in progress update meetings of strategic workgroups

The idea is for the intranet team to spread their wings as far as possible to cover grounds where common content can emerge.

At the right place
Staff expect to find common content when they go to the intranet. Hhmm... isn't this obvious? Yes, but things can go wrong if we leave it to chance. We must take preventive actions:

• The content staff expect is genuinely not there - Apart from content owners, all staff members need to know that the intranet is the place for common content and not email. The intranet team should also work with the IT department to control the use of mass email addresses, perhaps limiting their use only for emergencies.
  
• The content is there but it's hard to find - It's an information architecture concern for content to be findable. Always perform findability tests with 2 or 3 staff members and fine-tune the labels or categories applied to the content. Simply show the test participants the homepage and ask them where they would navigate to find the content if they were to complete an associated task.
  
• The content is there but it's hard to find it again - When content gets massive on an intranet, we need to balance between increasing the core navigation taxonomy versus learnability. We should try hard to preserve the core navigation taxonomy because that gives the intranet its stability. If staff members can find the content in their second or third attempt and subsequently find them again, then we say that the location of the content can be learned and give it a pass.

A well-researched information architecture design supports content scalability. However, there's only so much we can do at that point in time. When the intranet navigation starts to break due to the evolution of the business or the scope of the intranet, it's time to consider an intranet redesign.

Well-written
Well-written content encompass the following characteristics:

• Rich in domain knowledge (but don't mistake this for lengthy essays!): The person with the best knowledge must be sought to provide the content, or at least review them.
  
• Styled appropriately for the content medium: Writing for the Web, MS Word document, MS powerpoint, and graphic illustrations and etc requires different skillsets because the way we consume content on these mediums are different.
  
• Perfect in language: "Our organisation core values will ensures successful deliveries of you projects"... an instant turnoff, you know what I mean! Get someone who is good in language skills to proof read content.
• Exudes the brand of the organisation: This is especially true for external facing business content, occasionally corporate content are written in this way too for employee brand alignment.

To obtain guidance and consistency in writing, intranet style guides are usually produced.

Accurate, current and comprehensive
Staff members can sense content that is not accurate, current or comprehensive. This feeling will have viral effects on the rest of the common content. However, it's much safer for this group who can sense that these content are not usable than for those who go ahead and use them.

Here's what we can do to keep content accurate, current and comprehensive:

• Engage the business owner who is the custodian of the information to write it.
• Schedule periodic reviews with the custodian to review the content. Depending on the nature of the content, some may have predefined expiry dates, some need periodic reviews and some are pretty evergreen. Let the content custodian understand the various configurations and agree on a review period. Yes, this means you need a content inventory for the intranet to keep tabs on the expiry period of content. To make this an efficient process for the intranet team, we can define fixed review schedules and register new content for the next review so that they'll subsequently flow into the normal review cycle. If you have the luxury of tools, you can automate the review schedule and workflow.
  
• Let content custodian know that they are responsible for the quality of the content and the implications of not updating them in time. Sharing stories relating to disinformation may be useful. This would encourage them to initiate updates when changes are needed.
• Provide a feedback section on every intranet page. Sometimes, business owners don't know what content they need to provide until someone asks for it.
• Include the names of the business owners on each page. When staff can't find information on a page, seeing the name of the business owner helps them seek information directly from the source. The business owner can also learn about the missing content and provide incremental updates on the page.
  

Rid of Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) content
We remove weeds from soil so that plants can be free of external competition for nutrients. And weeds typically flourish much faster than plants. Weeds are analogous to ROT content. They are a distraction to what staff really need, and consumes energy to process and un-process them. During the periodic review, content custodians must be told to identify ROT content and remove them. ROT content could exist within web pages and documents, or it could apply to an entire web page or document. All references made to these ROT content should be redirected or removed. Investing in a broken link checker here is a good idea, rather than to rely on human memory or maintaining a manual inventory of link references.

Summary
The illustration summarises the points that have been mentioned so far. It has been logically sequence to content discovery, production and maintenance. I'm suggesting for the Content Strategist and Technical Writer from the intranet team to carry out these activities.
If we are serious about keeping pace with new/changing content and to produce quality content, the Content Strategist and Technical Writer are not secondary but necessary. We can think of the Content Strategist as the hunter and the Technical Writer as the chef. I'll recommend that these 2 roles be filled by different qualified people, so that we'll be able to keep pace with the content generated from new business initiaitives.

Conclusion
A large part of any intranets is common content. While an intranet doesn't thrive simply with quality common content, but it will certainly fail when it doesn't.

We can learn from the company Enbridge, winner of the Intranet Design Annual 2010, which emphasises on editorial workflow to ensure content quality; for example, each page has a named content owner to guard against stale information. We should take proper care of content quality and supply, and never assume discovery, production and maintenance of content to happen on its own.

Related resources

• Jane McConnell: When "global & local" becomes "common & specific"
• Mark Morrell: How to get quality content
• James Robertson: Strategies for improving and maintaining intranet content
• Sean Nicholson: Is It Time For Your Intranets Annual Performance Review?
• Jeffrey MacIntyre: Content Strategy - A community exploration of an emerging field of practice
  
• Quality web content: Writing guidelines for web content managers and authors
• Web Style Guide
  
• Yahoo style guide