Today’s staff members need to be able to work from home, from a branch office, from a hotel, or a client site. This requirement has prompted many organizations to beef up their intranet to serve as the “hub” for remote work. However, they are finding the standard approach to intranets (SharePoint, network drive access, no rhyme or reason given to information management other than the department name, multiple versions of important documents, ‘leftovers” from collaborative efforts, etc.)
You want to avoid un-navigable, messy, confusing intranet ecosystems. It’s important to set a goal for the overall project and then work with each department to implement their goals. The main objective of your intranet is to help users to conduct their tasks. This means it needs to be easy to work on the task in the intranet and I can think of no better way to architect this experience than using Laserfiche. Some experts suggest viewing tasks as services provided to colleagues and clients. Hence, if you want your intranet to be your information hub--then the service needs to work well within it.
It can be a mistake to work with departments without stepping back and envisioning the enterprise as a whole. This is because departments see their work in terms of “how” they do things not necessarily considering how their services are consumed. Also, the content structures will differ between departments along with metadata--which can lead to negative experiences while searching for a document.
Most of the internets I’ve experienced were built from the information production view. I'm suggesting an approach that focuses on an internal service consumer perspective. This ensures that all the relevant employee tasks are translated to internally provided services and properly documented.
So, what information do you need to manage concerning these services? In most cases the users require two types of information:
Foundational information- This informs the hows and whys of tasks such as SOPs, forms, training content, company contact info, etc.
Process information- These are the actual workflows such as vacation requests, invoices, orders. Sometimes this information is processed in your LOB applications but it can often be transacted in Laserfiche.
So how do you pull all this together? Here are some tips to lay the groundwork:
Identify All Internal services. This is a good time to query any areas for improvement and overall departmental objectives. Then ask what services they provide and have them rank the priority of the various services.
As a group, determine what services will be immediately available upon launch. This decision making should involve management and staff and may require some flexibility in terms of completion milestones.
Document, document, document- Have the process owner help identify and provide all the foundational information available. All this collected should be put in Laserfiche using standardized (among the departments) metadata. Laserfiche will allow you to offer a consistent user experience and ensure all items are findable. Users will have requests for the development of workflows for tasks. Be sure to keep a record of each request. Chiefly, the objective of the intranet is not to build workflow after workflow, but to deliver foundational information to employees.
Track progress for each department and service- If needed use formal project management such as Agile. Consider making your progress transparent via retrospectives or making your Gant chart available.
