How clean is your intranet?

Think about your house, do you have an untidy draw, or cupboard? Even an entire room? If you do, I am sure you have good intentions of tidying it up sometime in the future, although that might never come.

This is your chance to look at your intranet to determine how tidy it is, tidiness can be an indication of health, intranets are usually healthier and run more efficiently when they are tidy.

So what are the warning signs?

Good analytics will reveal what your users are searching for, what you can then do is put your popular search terms in to see what is presented, from the first few characters you type in you will start to see results. This will be your first clue as to how tidy your intranet is.

Is it as tidy as you would like it to be? Or is it like opening a draw and pulling out drawing pins or an old boiled sweet, when all you want is paper clips.

Take it to the next level and do a full search, look at the search results and consider if you as a company or community of content editors are seeing the results you want. This must involve others, you are not going to be alone in tidying up that cupboard or draw. If you search for award you may be happy with the results this returns.

Or it might be that you have a whole host of content that isn’t useful, it needs to be relevant to user’s needs. The example above only shows 10 results, so this is fairly tidy, but how much of it is useful?

If that’s not as expected look to promote content with best bets – tag the most looked for documents with related key words or phrases. So that’s one way to investigate it from the users point of view.

You can also use analytics to look at the document quality, how much care, attention and love do your content editors give to the content they put on your intranet? Do they remove irrelevant or out of date content? You probably do even if you are not aware of it.

Look if you have an author who is particularly good? Always give praise where it’s due, and look for ways to increase lower quality scores. It may be the case that particular editors are responsible for content which is more difficult to make engaging, but you would look to get the two’s and three’s as close to ten as possible.

The warning signs

With Interact Intranet it couldn’t be much easier as it gives you warnings to draw your attention to documents which need your attention, with an urgency rating. A document with a low quality score, for example a document which hasn’t been viewed in 3 months would be classed as high importance.

High Warnings

The high warnings you should probably look at quite soon, the low you can follow up as and when you have time. Above is a screen shot from Interact Analytics, you can see that 14 documents have passed their expiry date. By clicking through from here you would be taken to a page which links through to each of these documents.

Those that haven’t been used in 3 months may no longer be relevant, for example how relevant are the coach arrangements for the 2010 Christmas part in 2013?

If you have documents with inactive authors, what happens to when someone comments or gives feedback? Nothing is going to happen; this causes a situation where users may be disengaged by your intranet as their feedback has gone unnoticed.

Moderate warnings

There is criteria which marks the quality of your content out of 10, the content summary contributes to that score. So you will see that documents with summaries outside of the recommended word count would be flagged up.

Low warnings

One of the low warnings are, for example, possible duplicate documents, it will pick up on the title of the document and notify you here as a possible duplication.

It will show you the number of documents which have a low quality score, it will also let you know how many widgets appear on the home page with the same widget name that Interact gave it. For example ‘free text’ with a message from your HR director, needs changing to something relevant to the content of the widget or relevant to your intranet brand.

It will look at structure and tell you where you have a high volume of content in a particular area and it will also point out if there is a poor blend of widgets of your home page.

So these are practical measures you can use to assess how much of this applies to you and how can tidy your intranet, so you can become an Intranet Womble, Orinocho is my favourite.

So be an intranet Womble, love your intranet and keep it tidy.