Get started creating your intelligent intranet

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Now that you are familiar with the key success factors, phases, roles, and tasks needed to create an intelligent intranet, review next steps and get started planning.

Explore

Image of the exploration process for creating an intranet

  • Identify your key sponsors and stakeholders and review key organizational priorities. Document a vision that will help provide direction and help you prioritize opportunities.
  • Align key outcome goals with SharePoint capabilities to identify where you may need to invest in customization. Consider whether an “intranet in a box” solution might be appropriate for your organization.
  • Think about governance. What processes will you need to create to provision, manage, and maintain sites and content? Do you have security, retention, or compliance goals that need to be considered?
  • Think about branding and architecture—do you want all sites to share a common look and feel?
  • Analyze possible opportunities to identify priorities.
Role Exploration tasks
Organization intranet owners Identify your key sponsors and stakeholders and review key organizational priorities. Document a vision that will help provide direction and help you prioritize opportunities.
IT pros / Admins Organize a core team to plan governance—make sure you align your governance decisions to business goals.
Business owners / site owners Help identify key organizational opportunities and priorities.

Align and plan

Image of the planning process for creating an intranet

  • Work with business owners and IT to prioritize the intranet projects in your portfolio for the greatest business benefit in the shortest time.
  • Start by developing an understanding about what you need your intranet to accomplish and start organizing content assets and business outcomes. Organize depending on the needs of the business—by region, department, or function—and by the topics that your users care about.
  • As you prioritize your intranet projects, consider how to get the best performance and scalability from the portals that you build.
Role Aligning tasks
Organization intranet owners Communicate goals and progress from project start to finish. Director of the branding direction, governance strategy, information architecture, change management, and product adoption.
IT pros / Admins Responsible for platform integration, content migration, performance, scalability, and user training.
Business owners / site owners] Develop and plan solutions to business objectives. Responsible for site permissions, content audit, and content migration.
Content authors Authority on content best practices, content creation, content management, and page design.

Create and implement

Image of the building process for creating an intranet

  • Communicate goals progress regularly
  • Measure, learn, and pivot as you go
  • Get feedback regularly
Role Implementation tasks
Organization intranet owners Get user feedback along the way. Use findings from user feedback to learn and pivot your intranet plan.
IT pros / Admins Implement decisions made by the intranet stakeholders regarding site creation, navigation, search, branding, and publishing.
Business owners / site owners Use business objectives to drive decisions around site creation, navigation, branding, and audience targeting.
Content authors Create solutions to business objectives by creating and sharing relevant content with the right audiences.

Engage, manage, and maintain

Image of the managing process for an intranet

  • Celebrate the launch of your new intranet
  • Use metrics to measure progress
  • Communicate what's new
  • Maintain high-quality content
  • Educate users
Role Management tasks
Organization intranet owners Celebrate the launch of your new intranet. Communicate goals and progress regularly after the launch.
IT pros / Admins Communicate what's new with intranet stakeholders and business owners. Educate users about publishing rules like site creation and content retention policies.
Business owners / site owners Schedule content audits and use site usage metrics to measure progress.
Content authors Refresh existing content, publish new content and participate in scheduled content audits to keep content up-to-date and compliant.

Up next

Get started planning your intranet around initiatives that solve specific problems, can be implemented quickly, and will yield a high return on investment.

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