Craig Thomler’s first point is about quantifying and promoting satisfaction with an intranet. This makes sense to me because we don’t do this enough with ours.

I like the way he’s pointing out an opportunity within a potential obstacle. I hadn’t considered this at all. Very relevant and timely I reckon.

Quote:

I often advocate increasing intranet funding during cost cutting exercises as a lower cost channel for engaging staff and sharing information.

Seems like good advice.

Only three topics attained top-level navigation status on the majority of the intranets:

• human resources (HR) information (66%)
• company information, (63%)
• news (59%)

Whilst he found that information about departments or divisions was a top-level category in 46% of intranets, he points out that:

“In our study, task-based structures often endured better than intranets organized departmentally. In our user testing of intranets, we’ve also found that task-based navigation tends to facilitate ease-of-learning. Thus, the benefits for IA durability are just one more argument in favor of adopting a task-based structure for your intranet.”

He expanded on this by adding that manufacturing companies often have a product category in their top-level navigation, and companies that focus on intellectual property tend to have a top-level knowledge management (KM) category (he doesn’t give an example of what this might be though).

And a warning for management not to meddle:

“One change that can be disastrous for intranet navigability is requests from top management to change navigation labels to reflect the latest buzzwords or corporate fashions. “

click for Intranet Information Architecture (IA) (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)