intranet

Why nobody can find anything on your intranet

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A lone figure in a dark suit stands in an enormous surreal gallery beneath a bright blue sky, surrounded by hundreds of near-identical framed documents stretching impossibly into the clouds. One document glows neon yellow among the otherwise cream, orderly rows, suggesting the difficulty of finding the right information when everything looks equally authoritative.

Every organisation with an intranet eventually performs the same ritual.

Someone runs an employee survey. “I can’t find anything on the intranet” appears somewhere near the top. Everyone nods gravely. A project is formed.

Perhaps the search needs improving. Perhaps the navigation needs another go. Perhaps the homepage needs fewer tiles, or more tiles, or the same number of tiles but in a different order. Someone suggests AI, because it is 2026 and someone always suggests AI.

Things are moved around. Search is upgraded. The new navigation is launched with considerable ceremony.

Eighteen months later, someone runs another survey.

“I can’t find anything on the intranet.”

And round we go.

The problem is that organisations tend to treat findability as a technology problem. Sometimes it is. Quite often the technology is simply the place where a much messier organisational problem has chosen to make itself visible.

Before you start dragging things around the navigation again, it’s worth working out which problem you actually have.

Search matters. But it can’t perform miracles

Let’s get this out of the way first: bad enterprise search absolutely exists.

Search can be badly configured. Synonyms can be missing. Important results can be buried beneath ancient PDFs. Promoted results can point proudly to something nobody has used since Theresa May was prime minister. Pages can have titles written entirely in the language of the team that owns them.

If your expenses page is called “Expense Management Policy and Procedures” while everyone in the organisation searches for “claim expenses”, you have given your search engine an unnecessarily difficult afternoon.

As Jonathan Phillips and I put it in Digital Communications at Work, enterprise search is not Google with a lanyard.

Google has an almost unimaginably large pool of behavioural data from which to infer what you probably meant. Your intranet has Hannah from Procurement looking for the travel policy twice a year.

So yes: configure your search properly. Use synonyms. Look at what people are actually typing into the box. Write page titles for humans. Retire the promoted result for the 2018 office move.

All of that’s important.

But search can only work with what you give it. And “I can’t find anything” can mean at least five quite different things.

Five reasons employees can’t find information on your intranet

1. The information isn’t there

The simplest problem is also the one no search engine can fix. Sorry.

Someone wants to know how to request a new laptop. There is no page explaining how to request a new laptop.

They search for “new laptop”. Nothing useful appears. They try “replacement computer”. Nothing. They browse IT. They try Help. Eventually they message someone on Teams, who messages someone else, who sends them a link to a form they have inexplicably had bookmarked since 2021.

From the employee’s perspective, the intranet has failed.

This is a content gap, not a search problem. But search data can help you find it. Repeated searches with no useful result are a pretty good signal that people expect information to exist that doesn’t.

That makes zero-result searches some of the most interesting data your intranet produces. They’re people submitting content requests without knowing they’re doing it.

Does better search help? Not really. Search can tell you where the hole is. It cannot fill it.

2. It’s there, but called something unexpected

This one is more fixable.

The information exists, but the person who published it and the person looking for it use completely different language.

HR has published a page about “Family Leave”. Your employee searches for “maternity leave”.

Finance has “Travel and Expense Management”. Everyone else wants to “claim expenses”.

IT has an “End User Device Replacement Process”. Dave just wants a new laptop.

This is where search configuration, synonyms and better content design genuinely earn their keep. If hundreds of people search for “holiday” and your organisation insists on calling it “annual leave”, your search engine should be capable of holding both thoughts in its head.

But there’s a content lesson here too. Internal language has a habit of leaking into intranets. Department names, programme names, operating-model terminology and acronyms make perfect sense to the fourteen people who use them every day and considerably less sense to everyone else.

Organisations then compound this by insisting the technically correct term is the right one.

It may be. Your employees are still typing something else.

Does better search help? Yes. This is exactly the sort of problem it should help with. Better titles and content design help too.

3. It lives somewhere they wouldn’t think to look

Now things get more interesting.

The page exists. It has a perfectly sensible title. Search can probably find it.

But the employee is browsing.

Where should information about parental leave live?

Under Benefits? Policies? Working Here? Life Events? HR? People? Family?

There may be a perfectly logical answer from the perspective of the team that owns the content. Unfortunately, nobody has informed the employee of that logic.

This is how intranets end up reproducing the organisation chart in clickable form. Information is grouped according to who owns it rather than why someone needs it.

Finance owns expenses, so expenses live under Finance. IT owns collaboration tools, so guidance on Teams lives under IT. HR owns flexible working, so flexible working lives under HR.

Administratively, this is beautifully tidy. But all it asks of the employee is that they understand your operating model before they can book a train, which is simply not a thing people actually do.

Search provides an escape hatch here, but it doesn’t make the underlying structure good. And people don’t always search. They browse, particularly when they don’t know what the thing they need is officially called.

Does better search help? Sometimes. But this is fundamentally an information architecture problem.

4. Several plausible versions exist

This is where search can actively make things worse.

Someone searches for the travel policy.

Excellent news: the intranet has found it. In fact, it has found six of them.

There’s the current policy page, a PDF from 2024, another PDF attached to an old news story, a version sitting in Finance’s SharePoint site, a regional variation and a PowerPoint deck from somebody’s manager briefing.

All contain roughly the right words. All look plausible. One is correct.

Possibly.

Your search engine has done exactly what you asked it to do. It has found things matching the query. You cannot really blame it for the fact your organisation has spent seven years quietly breeding travel policies.

This is not a search failure. It is a content management failure.

Organisations accumulate information because creating content is easy and retiring it is not. A new version gets uploaded but the old one stays where it was. Teams create local copies because they don’t trust the central one to remain available. PDFs escape into document libraries and spend the next decade popping up in search results like administrative ghosts.

The result isn’t a lack of information; it’s an excess of it.

Does better search help? Potentially the opposite. It can surface all the duplication with tremendous efficiency.

5. Nobody has agreed which version is authoritative

And now we reach the problem search cannot touch.

Imagine there are three pages explaining how a particular process works. Not three old versions of the same thing. Three current versions.

Operations says the process works one way. HR describes it slightly differently. A regional team has adapted it because the central process doesn’t quite work for them.

Which one should search rank first?

There is no technical answer to that question, because the organisation has not agreed what is true.

This is the point at which “findability” stops being an intranet problem at all. You can tune search weights, tidy the metadata, redesign the navigation and put a shiny AI assistant over the top of the whole lot.

The AI assistant will still need to decide which of your three contradictory answers to believe. That isn’t artificial intelligence. That’s asking a chatbot to referee your governance dispute.

Search can only help you find the wrong answer faster.

And that distinction’s kinda critical, because all five problems feel exactly the same to the employee: I can’t find the bloody thing.

Underneath that one complaint might be a technology problem, a vocabulary problem, a structural problem, a content problem or a governance problem.

Treat them all as “search” and you can spend quite a lot of money solving the wrong one.

Intranet findability is a set of trade-offs

I’ve been working recently on information architecture for an organisation we’ve worked with, on and off, for several years.

They have an intranet. It works. People still struggle to find things.

That’s less damning than it sounds. In an organisation of any real complexity, findability isn’t a problem you solve so much as a set of trade-offs you choose deliberately.

Ten teams can have a legitimate claim on the same page. Three of them call it something different. The structure that makes perfect sense to the person responsible for maintaining the information may make no sense at all to the person who needs it once every eighteen months.

Take parental leave.

HR might think of it as a policy. A benefits team might think of it as part of the employee offer. The employee concerned may be thinking “having a baby”. Their manager may be looking for “what do I need to do when someone goes on maternity leave?”

None of these people is wrong. Which is, frankly, inconvenient.

This is why information architecture gets difficult surprisingly quickly.

You cannot simply ask people where something “belongs” and expect one correct answer to emerge. Nor can you hand the problem to the content owners, because content owners know too much. They understand distinctions, structures and organisational boundaries that ordinary employees have neither the time nor inclination to learn.

Once you have worked somewhere long enough, all sorts of absurd things start to feel self-evident. Of course Expenses sits under Corporate Services. Of course Flexible Working is in People Policies rather than Ways of Working. Of course P&C means People and Culture and not, say, something involving procurement.

Then someone joins the company and ruins everything by having no idea what any of it means.

The job isn’t to discover the perfect structure. It’s to find the compromises that create the least friction for the greatest number of people.

And to do that, you need evidence.

How to diagnose intranet findability problems

The useful question is not “How should we reorganise the intranet?”

It’s “Why are people struggling to find things?”

Different research methods let you see different bits of the problem.

Analytics and search logs show you what people do

Start with behaviour. What are people searching for? Which queries produce no results? Which searches are repeatedly reformulated? Where do people bounce backwards and forwards?

Search logs are particularly useful because they capture people expressing a need in their own language, rather than the language you’ve thoughtfully invented for them.

If 600 employees search for “payslip” every month and your payroll team calls the page “My Compensation Statement”, you have learned something.

If they repeatedly search for something that doesn’t exist, you may have found a content gap.

If they search for a policy that exists in seven places, congratulations: you may have found an entirely different problem.

Analytics tell you what happened. They don’t necessarily tell you why.

Interviews show you how people think

Talk to people and you begin to understand the mental model behind the behaviour.

What words do they use? Where would they expect something to live? What do they do when they can’t find it? Who do they ask instead?

This is often where apparently obvious organisational logic begins to wobble.

A content owner may tell you that something “obviously belongs under Operations”. An employee may reveal that they have no idea what Operations actually does.

Both are useful findings. Only one of those people is trying to find the page.

Open card sorting shows how people group things

In an open card sort, you give participants a collection of content items and ask them to group them in whatever way makes sense to them, then name the groups.

The important thing here is that you are not holding a referendum on the navigation.

If seven out of ten people put something under “Working Here”, democracy does not require you to put it there.

What you’re looking for is pattern.

Which things repeatedly end up together? Where is there broad agreement? Where do people diverge wildly? What words do they naturally use for categories?

And, often most usefully, which distinctions that seemed enormously important to the project team turn out to be invisible to everyone else?

Closed card sorting tests your proposed categories

A closed card sort starts from the other direction.

You provide the categories and ask people where they would expect particular items to sit.

Now you’re testing your homework.

If almost everyone puts an item where you expected, lovely.

If participants scatter it across five categories like confetti, also useful.

It tells you that the distinction which looked beautifully crisp on the workshop whiteboard may not survive contact with anyone who wasn’t in the workshop.

Again, the result does not tell you what you must do.

It gives you evidence.

Tree testing tells you whether people can actually navigate it

Once you have a proposed structure, tree testing lets you test the hierarchy without all the distracting furniture of an actual intranet.

Give someone a task: You want to find out whether you can work from another country for a month. Where would you go?

Then watch.

Can they reach the right destination? Do they take a direct route? Do they wander around? Does everyone confidently choose the same wrong branch?

That last one is particularly valuable. One person getting lost might be a person getting lost. Twenty people getting lost in exactly the same place is a design decision waving at you.

And it is considerably cheaper to discover this before launch than six months afterwards, when the navigation is live, the project team has disbanded and everyone has developed strong emotional attachments to the nouns.

Test the structure before you build the bloody thing.

None of these methods gives you the whole picture.

In Digital Communications at Work, we use the analogy of reconstructing an extinct animal from fossils. You rarely have a complete skeleton laid obligingly in front of you. You have fragments and traces from which you build the most plausible picture.

The same is true here.

Analytics cannot tell you about the page someone never found. Interviews tell you what people say they do, which is not always what they actually do. Card sorts strip away much of the context in which real information-seeking happens. Tree tests tell you whether people can navigate your proposed hierarchy, not whether the content waiting at the end is any good.

Every method gives you a partial view.

The useful stuff happens when you put them together.

Research still doesn’t give you the answer

This is the bit that tends to disappear from neat diagrams of the UX process.

You can run interviews, analyse search data, conduct card sorts and tree-test your proposed navigation.

At the end of all that, the computer does not flash up:

CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE DISCOVERED THE CORRECT INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Annoying, really. You still have to make decisions.

Research gives you evidence with which to make better compromises. It shows you where people’s mental models converge and where they don’t. It gives you grounds for pushing back when a team insists its content absolutely must have a top-level navigation item because it is Very Important Indeed. It helps you distinguish an edge case from a widespread need.

But there is no objectively perfect taxonomy sitting somewhere in the data waiting for a sufficiently diligent consultant to uncover it.

At some point, someone has to choose.

And sometimes the research takes you straight back to the organisational questions you were hoping the intranet project would allow you to avoid.

Who owns this information?

Who is allowed to change it?

Which version takes precedence?

Who decides when two parts of the organisation disagree?

Those are not search questions.

Bad search is a technology problem. Bad structure is a design problem. Duplication is a content problem. Authority is a governance problem.

To the employee, they all look exactly the same: I can’t find anything on the intranet.

That’s why curiosity is more useful than certainty here. Don’t begin with the solution you already wanted to implement and work backwards until the research agrees with you. Work out which problem you actually have.

If people can’t find anything on your intranet, don’t start by moving the navigation around.

At Lithos Partners, we help large and complex organisations work out what is actually going wrong before jumping to the solution: using research, analytics, card sorting, tree testing and good old-fashioned conversations with the people who have to use the thing.

And if you’re not quite ready to have that conversation, Jonathan Phillips and I go into considerably more detail about search, information architecture, governance and designing channels around employee needs in Digital Communications at Work: Designing Channels for Employee Engagement and Experience.

Start with Discovery: how to find out what’s actually wrong with your internal comms

/ Sharon O'Dea / 3 Comments
A surrealist painting of a bowler-hatted man examining an open refrigerator with a magnifying glass. The brightly lit fridge contains nothing but a grey four-drawer filing cabinet. The sparse, muted room and the man’s solemn attention make the absurd scene feel entirely ordinary.

“We need a new intranet.”

I get this brief a lot. Sometimes it’s an app. Sometimes it’s “we need to reduce email volume” or “we need to do something about Teams.” Occasionally someone has already got as far as choosing the product and would now like some research to confirm they were right.

Unfortunately none of these things is actually a problem. They’re solutions somebody has already chosen, usually in a meeting I wasn’t in, and my job as briefed is to go away and build the thing.

Jon and I spent an hour with IABC members this afternoon making the case for not doing that. The session was billed as how to find out what’s actually wrong with your comms, which is a better title than we’d have come up with ourselves because it names the gap rather neatly. Most organisations know something isn’t working. Far fewer can tell you what. And the distance between those two states is Discovery.

The audit trap

When comms teams do decide to look before they leap, they nearly always reach for an audit. Catalogue the channels. Count the newsletters. Map the publishing calendar. Produce a spreadsheet with 400 rows in it and a slide saying WE HAVE 17 CHANNELS, as if the number itself is the diagnosis.

Audits aren’t useless. They’re just usually the wrong place to start. For one thing, an audit tells you what you’re serving, not what anyone wants to eat. It’s a stocktake of the fridge. You come away knowing you own a lot of yoghurt and no bread, but not whether anyone in the house is lactose intolerant.

Everything you learn is bounded by what already exists. Which means the thing that might actually help — the channel you don’t have, the moment in somebody’s day you’ve never designed for, the workaround everyone uses instead — is structurally invisible.

The second problem is slightly more awkward. If your team publishes the channels, your team is now auditing its own homework. You will discover that the newsletter is broadly fine and the intranet could do with a redesign, because those are conclusions everyone can live with. I’ve watched very capable people do this in complete good faith. It isn’t dishonesty; you just can’t see the water you’re swimming in.

Discovery starts at the other end. Not “what have we got?” but “what are people actually trying to do, and where does it go wrong?”

What Discovery actually is

The idea isn’t ours, and it isn’t new. It grew out of agile and user-centred design, after enough expensive digital projects had failed for people to notice a recurring feature: teams kept leaping enthusiastically towards solutions before they’d properly understood the problem. The UK Government Digital Service made Discovery standard practice, and the discipline has gradually seeped into adjacent fields ever since.

Internal comms has been slower to catch on, partly because we’ve never really thought of ourselves as builders of things. But we are. A channel is a product. Content is a service. And the failure modes are remarkably similar: eighteen months, a six-figure budget, a great deal of stakeholder excitement, then launch day arrives and everybody else carries on with their lives.

At its simplest, Discovery means swapping assumptions for evidence. It’s the shift from “what do we want to say?” to “what do people need, and what would have to be true for this to work for them?” That is more mindset than methodology, and it can be uncomfortable because it asks you to slow down at precisely the point everyone is desperate to demonstrate momentum.

One leader I worked with used to say “facts are friendly”, usually just before somebody put an extremely unfriendly number on a slide. It’s the right instinct. The point of Discovery isn’t to prove your gut right. It’s to find out, early and cheaply, which bits of your gut are wrong.

Why slowing down makes you faster

This is the bit that gets pushback, because Discovery looks like delay. Four to six weeks of research before anyone builds anything appears on a Gantt chart as four to six weeks in which nobody has changed the colour of the homepage and everyone’s still complaining about it. When budgets are tight and a sponsor wants a launch date, it’s therefore one of the first things to disappear.

But the cost of being wrong rises sharply the later you find out. Fixing a misconception on a whiteboard costs an afternoon. Fixing it during build costs a change request. Fixing it after launch costs the change request, the migration, the rework and some portion of the credibility you’ve just spent telling everyone the shiny new thing was going to make their working lives better.

Software engineering learned this decades ago, largely by making all these mistakes first. There are various neat rules of thumb suggesting defects become ten times more expensive at each stage. I’d treat the exact multiplier with suspicion; the underlying point is less controversial. Finding out early is cheaper than finding out late.

But there’s another failure mode that matters more than money. Look at why large internal projects go wrong and it’s rarely because somebody couldn’t make the technology function. It’s unclear requirements, unexamined assumptions, teams building competently and diligently towards a destination nobody properly agreed. You cannot engineer your way out of having solved the wrong problem, and no amount of change management will persuade people to adopt something that simply doesn’t fit their day.

Discovery is cheap insurance against building the wrong thing beautifully.

Start with what you already know

The first move isn’t research. It’s an inventory of belief.

Most organisations are sitting on years of potentially useful material: old comms surveys, engagement data, post-implementation reviews, research from the last intranet project, a strategy deck from three restructures ago. Some of it is gold. Some of it is actively misleading. Old research is like milk: check the date and give it a sniff before pouring it over anything important. A survey run before a major restructure tells you a great deal about an organisation that no longer exists.

Then write down what you think you know. Not vague impressions, but specific claims that can turn out to be wrong:

  • Frontline workers don’t see HR updates because they don’t have email access.
  • People ignore the intranet homepage because it’s cluttered and irrelevant.
  • Managers are quietly rewriting key messages before they reach their teams.

Put them on a board with four columns: to test, partially validated, validated, disproven. Then move them as the evidence arrives. Trello, Planner, Notion, spreadsheet, sticky notes: it really doesn’t matter. What matters is committing your assumptions to writing before you start looking for evidence, so you can’t quietly retrofit the story later. Academics call this pre-registering your hypothesis. In comms, I prefer to think of it as making it harder to mark your own homework twice.

It does something else useful too: it stops Discovery sprawling. You’re not setting out to research absolutely everything anyone has ever thought about internal communication. You’re pulling on named threads. And when a stakeholder asks why you’re recommending something, you can show them the belief, the evidence and how your view changed, which is a significantly better answer than “trust me, I did some interviews.”

Means, motive and opportunity

The most useful frame I know for understanding user needs is borrowed from every moderately competent television detective.

Means: can people technically access the channel? Login, device, email address, permissions. This is where comms teams tend to stop, because it’s the bit we can see and the bit IT can report. But access is table stakes. It tells you what’s technically possible, not what anybody actually does.

Opportunity: when, in the real shape of someone’s working day, can they engage? Five quiet minutes at a desk? Thirty seconds on a phone between jobs? Nothing until they’ve clocked off and would rather be literally anywhere else?

And then motive: why would they bother? Does this help them do the job faster, better or with fewer headaches? If not, attention evaporates regardless of how lovingly somebody has written the CEO update.

We worked with an organisation employing hundreds of maintenance staff who spent their days out on the road. Adoption of the intranet was dismal. Leadership’s diagnosis was that the site needed to work better on tablets. On paper, means looked fine: everyone had a login.

Then we went and watched people work. There was one device per vehicle, not per person, so access meant sharing a tablet behind a clunky login. Opportunity was worse. They spent most of the working day driving, and unsurprisingly were not allowed to use a device at the wheel. Their main window for checking the intranet was therefore at the end of a shift, parked up, when its principal competitor for their attention was going home. And then motive: why wrestle with a slow site to read generic organisational news that had nothing whatsoever to do with the job in front of you?

A tablet-optimised intranet would have solved almost none of this. What helped was removing friction, designing properly for mobile and introducing audio content people could listen to hands-free while driving. None of that is especially clever. It is, in retrospect, painfully obvious — but things often become obvious once you’ve bothered to look.

Mix your methods, and skip the focus groups

Surveys and analytics tell you what is happening and, roughly, at what scale. Interviews, observation and diary studies help tell you why. Treating these as competing methodological tribes is a category error: you need both.

Analytics have one particularly important blind spot in internal comms: they can only show you the behaviour of people who are already using your channels. The employee who gave up six months ago leaves no trace. Neither does the colleague who never had access in the first place, nor the team who have quietly moved their entire working life into a WhatsApp group you know nothing about.

Those shadow channels are often the most revealing thing Discovery surfaces. They show you precisely what the official system is failing to do, because somebody has already gone to the trouble of building a workaround.

One method I’d generally avoid for diagnosis is the focus group. They’re seductive: one meeting, lots of voices, apparently faster than doing a load of individual interviews, and senior leaders love them. In practice, people are much less likely to admit in front of colleagues that they don’t understand something, dislike something or have abandoned the official process altogether. Add hierarchy to the room and it gets worse.

To run one properly you need two researchers anyway, which rather eats into the supposed efficiency. You also have to find a point when eight busy people are free at once, so good luck with that. Focus groups are useful for co-creation and testing ideas. They’re a fairly poor way to diagnose what’s actually going wrong.

Knowing when to stop

Research is not an endurance sport. When the same hypotheses keep getting reconfirmed and new interviews stop surprising you, you’ve hit saturation. Stop. More research at that point won’t make you more certain; it will mostly consume money you could be spending fixing the thing you now understand.

For most comms Discoveries, a part-time project over roughly eight weeks is a reasonable rule of thumb. Larger and more complicated organisations may need longer. Genuinely unexplored territory may need longer.

Then you synthesise: cluster the findings, name the themes, show the patterns and be explicit about what your evidence cannot tell you. Every research method has biases and gaps. The mistake isn’t using imperfect evidence — there is no other kind — but presenting it as complete.

And finally, triage. What’s a quick win? What’s structural? What needs a year? What would require an entirely different operating model? And, crucially, what isn’t yours to fix?

A good Discovery will surface things that look like communication problems but aren’t: a broken process, an unpopular policy, a manager who doesn’t manage, a workload problem, a system designed around a neat version of the organisation that has never existed outside PowerPoint. Being able to tell a leadership team “this is not a communication problem, and no new channel will fix it” is one of the more useful outputs of Discovery, even when it isn’t what they hired you to say.

Do this properly and you arrive at the business case with something surprisingly rare: a clear account of what is actually wrong, evidence that it is wrong, and a defensible view about what to tackle first.

Which seems a considerably better place to start than “we need a new intranet.”

Discovery is Chapter 1 of Digital Communications at Work, the book I wrote with Jonathan Phillips. It covers all eight steps in full, including stakeholder interviews, ethics and synthesis. The research methods toolkit that wouldn’t fit in the chapter is free to download. And if you’d rather not run one on your own, that’s what we do.

Designing channels for complex organisations

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A quiet surrealist office in muted grey tones. A woman in a grey suit stands with her back to us, facing five identical open doors. Each doorway reveals a different sky: blue and sunny, dark and stormy, warm evening light, pouring rain, and bright clouds. A sparse wooden desk and lamp sit to one side as she stands motionless, choosing none of the doors.

Somewhere in your organisation there is a person wearing one organisation’s uniform, carrying a second organisation’s lanyard, and logging into a third organisation’s systems with a password only the first can reset.

They are doing a job that at least two of those organisations believe belongs to somebody else.

They are not an edge case. Not any more.

Research by SAP and Oxford Economics, surveying 2,050 executives across more than 20 countries, found that only 58% of workforce spend goes on employees. The other 42% buys contingent workers and service providers: contractors, agencies, IT outsourcers, consultancies. More than half of those executives said their organisation couldn’t conduct business as usual without them.

And yet we still draw the organisation as a pyramid.

One person at the top, everyone else arranged obediently underneath, solid lines and dotted lines and a surprising amount of money spent arguing about where they should go. Then we design internal communications for that picture: one intranet, one all-staff email, one audience, one direction of travel.

The picture was always a simplification. What’s changed is how much of the actual organisation now sits outside it.

The organisation on the slide isn’t the organisation people work in

Real organisations are messy.

Work runs through partners, contractors, shared services, joint ventures and outsourced back offices. Two organisations can share a finance function and approximately none of a culture. A team is fully shared across two employers while HR is shared only transactionally. Someone is employed by one entity, works exclusively for another, and consequently can’t see either one’s internal communications properly.

This isn’t unusual, and it isn’t a temporary state of disrepair on the way to something tidier. It is the organisation.

In Digital Communications at Work, Jonathan Phillips and I describe today’s internal audience as including contractors, freelancers, agency staff, suppliers and partners: people who sit inside the working life of an organisation without sitting on its payroll.

The boundary around “internal” has got very fuzzy indeed.

Then add all the people your internal communication channels were never particularly good at reaching in the first place. Frontline and deskless colleagues make up around 80% of the global workforce, and many have no corporate email address and no reason to spend their working day lovingly browsing the intranet.

Access is uneven. Context is uneven. Someone who has worked there for fifteen years has a completely different map of the place in their head from someone who has worked fifteen shifts.

Enterprise software doesn’t much like any of this, because enterprise software has generally been designed for an organisation tidier than any organisation that has ever existed. Even now, major platforms struggle with someone holding multiple affiliations inside a single institution, never mind across several (working across two or more instances of Teams, for example, remains a PITA).

So we design channels for the diagram and then wonder why the people who don’t fit neatly inside the diagram aren’t using them.

This is an internal communications problem before it’s a technology one

When the channel estate isn’t working, the instinct is usually to go shopping.

New intranet. Better search. Employee app. AI assistant. Something with a reassuringly expensive implementation partner attached.

But a systematic review of 77 studies of digital internal communication found the same problem recurring: channels rolled out top-down without enough attention to whether they fitted how people actually worked.

The tool was rarely the interesting bit. The assumptions underneath it were.

And the bar for changing people’s behaviour is high. Gourville’s rule of thumb suggests people need to perceive a new system as roughly nine times better than the habit it replaces before they’ll switch.

Against an existing workaround — a WhatsApp group, a noticeboard, asking Sandra in Finance because Sandra actually knows — nine times better is a demanding standard.

Against nothing at all, the bar is practically on the floor.

Which is worth remembering before spending a year replacing something that works reasonably well for the people at the centre while leaving the people at the edges with bugger all.

Complexity doesn’t make channel design impossible. But it makes guessing impossible.

Start with what communication needs to do, not which platforms you own

The trouble with mapping your internal communications channels as a list of tools is that it tells you what you’ve bought.

It doesn’t tell you whether any of it works.

You get an inventory when what you need is a diagnosis.

The five-layer model we use in the book maps the capabilities a communication ecosystem needs rather than the products that happen to deliver them:

  • Plan: where campaigns, priorities and editorial calendars get coordinated. Invisible to employees; essential to communicators.
  • Collaborate: where content gets drafted, reviewed and signed off.
  • Publish: the source of truth. Structured, accurate and searchable.
  • Distribute: getting the right thing to the right person at the right time.
  • Discuss: dialogue, feedback and sense-making.

These aren’t five little boxes into which you must now dutifully sort Microsoft 365. They overlap. They reinforce one another. A single announcement might pass through all five.

The useful thing about thinking in layers is that the layers survive the platform churn.

Tools come and go. Names change. Products get bundled, rebranded, sunsetted and occasionally transformed into an AI assistant nobody remembers asking for. But these five jobs still need doing somewhere.

And in a complex organisation, the model lets you ask a much more useful question than should we have one intranet or several?

You can ask: what actually needs to be shared?

Shared or local? It depends what you’re sharing

Every complex organisation eventually has this argument.

Central control gives you accuracy and consistency, but can feel distant and generic. Local ownership gives you nuance, relevance and speed, but also duplication, contradiction and the occasional page last updated during the Cameron administration.

Choose entirely one or the other and you lose something you need.

At the level of “should we have one intranet or two?”, this is almost impossible to resolve because it isn’t really a technology question. It’s a question about identity, brand, budget, power and who gets to decide things, wearing a SharePoint hat.

Break it into layers and it gets much easier.

I ran this exercise recently with communications, HR, digital and transformation leaders across two organisations that shared much of a back office and very little else. The resulting pattern is one I’d expect to see in a lot of complex organisations.

Publish pulls hard towards shared.

Policy, terms, anything with legal or regulatory weight: you want one authoritative version. Copying the same information across multiple estates is how you end up with two confidently contradictory answers to the same question.

This is the layer I’d consolidate first.

AI has made this more important, not less. When an assistant starts surfacing intranet content directly, stale and duplicated pages don’t merely sit quietly being wrong somewhere nobody visits. The machine can now fetch them and be wrong on your behalf.

Discuss stays stubbornly local.

This is where culture lives. You can establish minimum standards for conduct and moderation, but you can’t centrally procure a community.

People have an irritating tendency to decide for themselves who they want to talk to.

Design this with them, not for them.

Plan sits awkwardly in the middle, because of course it does. Different leadership cycles, priorities and approval chains make fully shared planning difficult even where everyone is notionally committed to it.

Collaborate follows the work. Different brands, different style guides, different approval processes. Making all of that shared generally requires senior decisions considerably bigger than “where shall we put the Word document?”

And then there’s distribution.

Your distribution problem is really a people-data problem

Distribution is the layer that catches people out because its unit isn’t an organisation.

It’s a person.

A particular person, with a particular contract, role, location, device and set of permissions, who may work for two organisations and be properly represented in the directory of neither.

Which means distribution becomes an identity and employee-data problem long before it becomes an internal communications channel problem.

If you can’t reliably answer who is this person, what should they be able to see, and how can we reach them?, then targeting is mostly decorative.

You can spend weeks designing beautiful audience segments. If the finance officer employed by Organisation A but working full-time for Organisation B isn’t correctly represented in the underlying systems, no amount of clever channel strategy will make them magically appear on the right list.

Get identity right and all sorts of things become possible: one publishing estate with personalised views, targeted distribution that actually reaches contractors and frontline staff, and clear rules about who gets access to what.

Get it wrong and you can rebuild the intranet every three years until retirement and remain faintly disappointed by the results.

The bit of the digital workplace nobody sells you

There is a part of all this no vendor will quote for: Identity. Navigation. Search. A shared design language. The connective tissue that makes a collection of separately procured tools feel, to the unfortunate person trying to use them, like one place.

You can buy an ITSM platform, an HR system, a CMS and an employee app. You can give each of them a cheerful name and launch them with cupcakes.

But you can’t buy coherence.

The average organisation now runs well over a hundred applications, each perfectly sensible on its own terms and together producing an experience like an orchestra warming up: every instrument playing its own tune, quite competently.

In the book we describe the intranet as the wrapper, not the chocolate bar. I’d go further: the important bit isn’t any single platform. It’s the experience created at the joins.

Somebody has to own that.

Not each tool. The whole.

Because choices made in isolation get paid for at the joins, and the joins are where employees actually live.

Design an internal communications ecosystem that survives the next reorganisation

Complex organisations reorganise. It’s practically a hobby.

Shared services get created, merged, renamed and unpicked. Partners arrive and leave. Business units combine. Someone unveils a new operating model with pleasingly rounded rectangles and announces that it will make everything simpler.

If your internal communications architecture depends on the current organisation chart remaining true, start the countdown.

There are five principles I’d design around instead:

  • Adaptability: assume the organisation chart will change and the channels shouldn’t have to
  • Accessibility: including the version that means frontline, deskless and low-bandwidth access, not just WCAG compliance
  • Clarity of ownership: “who looks after this?” should be a question with an answer
  • Interoperability: content and state need to be able to leave the system they were created in.
  • Cognitive simplicity: every additional interface is a tax, and employees pay it

And I’d add a sixth, less comfortable one: mandate.

Skills you can hire. Time you can, eventually, carve out. But someone needs the authority to make decisions across the boundaries.

In a shared or complex organisation, the person responsible for the digital workplace without the authority to say no to senior stakeholders on either side owns the blame and none of the levers.

No amount of elegant architecture makes organisational politics disappear. But being explicit about who has the mandate to make decisions is usually the difference between a channel strategy that survives contact with reality and one that gets quietly negotiated into beige.

Design for the organisation you actually have

The useful shift is a small one.

Stop treating organisational complexity as a defect to be tidied away before the real design work starts. Treat it as the design constraint.

Because the mess isn’t evidence that there’s no system.

Quite often, the mess is the system.

It’s running on local knowledge, friendships, workarounds, favours, WhatsApp groups and hundreds of tiny negotiations nobody has ever written down. It’s the person everybody knows to ask. The spreadsheet somebody maintains because the official system doesn’t quite work. The contractor who’s been there eight years and still can’t open the link in the all-staff email.

Designing a beautifully logical channel architecture that ignores all of that doesn’t simplify the organisation.

It simply gives people one more thing to work around.

Nobody experiences a tool. They experience a task.

Design for the task, and for the person trying to get it done — whichever organisation’s lanyard they happen to be wearing today.

This essay draws on ideas from my book, Digital Communications at Work: Designing channels for employee engagement and experience, written with Jonathan Phillips and published by Kogan Page.

If you’re wrestling with this in your own organisation, my consultancy practice, Lithos Partners, runs discovery, designs channels and develops digital workplace strategy for organisations that don’t fit the neat diagram.

SharePoint is a box of Lego: how to choose an intranet platform

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A muted, Magritte-style painting of a woman in a grey suit seen from behind, sitting at a wooden desk building a large grey Lego Star Destroyer. Loose bricks and a sorting tray are spread across the desk, with an open instruction booklet in front of her showing a different model. A brass lamp, a window onto a pale sky, and a framed painting of clouds fill the quiet grey room.

Every now and then, someone asks me what the best intranet platform is.

It’s a reasonable question. It also has no answer, which makes it an annoying one to be asked at a party. (I’m fun at parties, honestly).

There are dozens of dedicated intranet products before you get anywhere near the various flavours of SharePoint and the growing pile of employee apps. Then come the demos. The analyst reports. The comparison matrices with forty rows and an encouraging quantity of green ticks. The sales teams who each explain that their product was designed specifically for organisations exactly like yours.

Somewhere around week three, IT joins the conversation with a list of things they will never support, procurement asks a question nobody can answer, somebody discovers a security requirement that apparently existed all along, and everyone quietly forgets what problem they were trying to solve.

Which is why the first job isn’t evaluating intranet platforms. It’s deciding how you’re going to evaluate them.

Why it’s usually SharePoint

For most large organisations, SharePoint is the default before anyone has made a decision at all.

It’s bundled with Microsoft 365. IT already knows how to run it. It handles documents and permissions properly. It connects to Teams, OneDrive and Outlook without requiring an integration project, three consultants and a small blood sacrifice.

And there’s a practical reason that gets less airtime: it’s considerably easier to get approval to build something on a platform you already own than to ask for money for a new one.

Plenty of SharePoint intranets exist not because anyone chose SharePoint, but because choosing anything else required a fight nobody had the appetite for.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can build genuinely excellent intranets in SharePoint. Most years, eight of the top ten in the Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design Annual are built on it.

But in a world where everyone wants a fully formed toy, SharePoint is a box of Lego.

And as with Lego, what you end up with depends less on how many bricks you have than on your skills, imagination, time and budget.

Allow me to stretch this analogy well past the point of good taste.

Route one: the box of Lego

a pile of lego bricks in various colours

Native SharePoint, straight out of the box, is an effectively unlimited supply of bricks.

In theory, you can build anything. A castle. A cathedral. A working model of the Endurance.

In practice, you have a job, four other priorities and a stakeholder who wants their department’s page to be a different shade of blue.

So you build a small house with a door and two windows.

And that’s fine! It meets the brief. Everyone can get inside. It shuts people up for five minutes.

It just isn’t quite the magnificent thing everyone imagined when they heard the word flexible.

Because that’s the catch with infinite flexibility: every decision is now yours to make. And defend. And document. And remake when somebody sufficiently senior sees it for the first time six months after approving it.

You can build a spaceship.

You will spend six months arguing about where to put the rockets.

Route two: the Lego kit

A Lego main street kit, built with shops and lego figurines

Buy a Lego kit and you follow the instructions and get something genuinely impressive in an afternoon.

The intranet equivalent is an intranet-in-a-box: a product that sits on top of SharePoint and makes it behave rather more like a fully fledged content management system.

You get templates. A design system. Navigation. Governance features. Better publishing tools. Quite a lot of decisions somebody else has already made for you.

We’ve delivered one of these end to end, including all the content, in three and a half months.

The trade-off is that you’re stuck with the pieces in the box.

If you want to turn the record store into a bookshop, you’re out of luck because the kit only came with the orange and yellow storefront.

For a lot of organisations, this is exactly the right answer. In fact, the constraint is often the thing you’re paying for.

Fixed templates end the debate about page layouts before it starts. Information appears in the same place on every page. Editors don’t need to become amateur web designers. Readers don’t have to relearn the interface every time they move from HR to Finance.

Constraint can be a feature.

Expect pushback from content editors who want more control. Expect someone to ask why you’re paying licence fees for a thing that sits on top of another thing you’ve already paid for.

Both are perfectly winnable arguments if you’ve decided in advance what you’re optimising for.

Route three: make your own kit

If the standard kits don’t fit, you can have one made.

An agency builds you a set of templates, components and a design system on top of native SharePoint. You get your own box of parts and your own instructions, so teams can create consistent pages quickly without designing each one from scratch.

You end up roughly where the kit gets you, except it’s your bookshop rather than someone else’s record store.

It typically takes nine to twelve months.

And when, two years later, somebody wants the bookshop to become an airport, you go back to the agency or find someone who understands how it was built.

Again: not necessarily a problem.

But it is now a thing you own.

Customisation has a habit of being discussed as a one-off cost when it’s really a small pet you’ve agreed to feed indefinitely.

Route four: build the Millennium Falcon

a complex custom scene made of lego

With enough time, deep knowledge of every component and what amounts to a 3D printer — an in-house development team — you can build almost anything.

Some of these intranets are extraordinary. Many of them win awards.

They also take, on average, twenty-three months and a team of fifteen. That number is one of the most useful things in the whole NNg Design Annual, and it’s the bit that tends to get skipped over on the way to the screenshots.

Because screenshots travel rather better than resourcing models. If you’re a team of two with a year and no development budget, an award-winning intranet built by fifteen people over two years is not a benchmark. It’s something a completely different organisation was able to afford.

There is no useful lesson in staring at their Millennium Falcon and wondering why your box contains twelve red bricks and a little plastic tree.

And the option that isn’t Lego at all

You can, of course, leave the Microsoft ecosystem entirely.

Standalone intranet platforms often have markedly better user experience, editorial workflow and mobile support. Employee apps are mobile-first and task-focused, and they’re frequently the only serious option for reaching frontline, field or contracted staff who have never logged into a corporate laptop and never will.

If your workforce is mostly deskless, this isn’t really the alternative route. It may be the obvious one.

But now you inherit different plumbing: single sign-on, people data, integrations, syncing and the possibility of content and effort quietly duplicating across two estates.

None of this tends to be the exciting bit of the demo. All of it will be the exciting bit of year two.

Before choosing an intranet platform, decide how you’ll choose

None of the above tells you what to buy. That’s because the platform was never the first question.

Four things are.

What’s the actual mix?

Every intranet is balancing the same handful of jobs: communication, knowledge, transactions and collaboration. Every organisation weights them differently.

Jon and I call this the graphic equaliser because the sliders sit in a different place everywhere.

An intranet for lawyers and engineers has a very different job from one serving retail staff on shift. A company where the intranet is primarily a route into HR services needs something different from one where its main purpose is publishing news and knowledge.

Work out where your sliders are before you look at a single product.

Otherwise the product demo will decide your requirements for you.

Who genuinely has to use it?

Not the audience in the strategy deck.

The actual people.

The contractor who doesn’t have an email address. The warehouse worker sharing a device. The colleague in the acquired company who still has the wrong identity in Active Directory. The person who visits the intranet twice a year and absolutely will not remember what you named the expenses section.

This single question rules out more platforms than almost any feature comparison.

What are the red lines?

“It has to be SharePoint because IT won’t support anything else” is a common cry and sometimes a completely real constraint.

Fine.

Find that out on day one.

There is no prize for conducting an elegant eight-week platform selection exercise and discovering at the end that three of the four options were never actually options.

Budget can be a red line. Data residency can be one. Accessibility. Authentication. Procurement. The ability to reach people without Microsoft 365 licences.

A constraint you know about is a design input.

A constraint you discover after the preferred-vendor presentation is a massive pain in the arse.

What are you signing up to run?

This is the question most platform selection processes don’t spend nearly enough time on.

Every route has an ongoing cost in people, not just licences.

Someone has to govern it. Maintain the templates. Manage permissions. Keep the navigation coherent. Support editors. Fix the search. Challenge the director who wants a button on the homepage. Notice that 40% of the content hasn’t been reviewed since 2024.

The question isn’t simply which platform is best.

It’s which one can you realistically keep good?

You’re choosing constraints as much as features

There is no universally right intranet platform.

There is a right path for your organisation: one that balances technology, time, money, capability, what your people will actually use and whatever internal red lines turn out to exist.

And every route involves a trade-off:

  • Native SharePoint gives you flexibility, but asks you to make more decisions.
  • An intranet-in-a-box makes more decisions for you, but limits what you can change.
  • A custom SharePoint build gives you control, but creates something you have to maintain.
  • A standalone platform may give you a better experience, but adds another system to the estate.

Those aren’t flaws hidden in the small print.

They are the decision.

Most organisations don’t have unlimited time or money, so they compromise on something that’s good enough for now and meets most of what they need.

That’s not a failure of ambition. That’s just pragamtism.

What matters is being able to explain why: clearly, in a sentence, to someone who wasn’t in the room.

Ideally before the first vendor demo does the explaining for you.

Because you can build a perfectly good intranet out of almost any of these.

You just can’t build one out of a decision nobody can remember making.

This essay grew out of a weeknote from December 2024 and a conversation I keep having with clients. The Lego analogy, and a fuller breakdown of the solution paths, appears in Digital Communications at Work, written with Jonathan Phillips and published by Kogan Page.

If you’re at the start of this decision, Lithos Partners does discovery, requirements and platform selection for organisations that would rather not find out in year two.

Weeknote 2025/15

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
Obligatory touristy shot of Nyhavn, Copenhagen. Photo: Sharon O’Dea

There’s something about spending time with your nerd tribe that hits the reset button in the best way. After a few days in Denmark talking shop with the digital workplace faithful—followed by a gloriously sunny weekend back in Amsterdam—I’m feeling that perfect combination of knackered and energised. The kind of tired that comes not from burnout, but from doing work that matters, with people who get it.

This week at work

Huge week. Monday brought excellent news about a new project I can’t tell you about yet (and keeping it a secret is killing me). But rest assured, the moment the NDA drops, I’ll be shouting about it from the nearest rooftop.

Tuesday saw me hopping over to Copenhagen for the IntraTeam Event. My annual pilgrimage to the temple of digital workplace nerdery. I’ve been going since 2011, and it remains one of the few conferences that doesn’t just skim the surface. No hype, no fluff, just solid, detail-rich sessions with people who’ve done the work on complex, interesting digital workplaces.

My Lithos colleague Jonathan took to the stage with Sabine Arnold from our client SEFE Securing Energy for Europe, talking about how we delivered a content-first intranet in just 100 days. No generative AI in sight, just good, old-fashioned content design done properly, in two languages and at a frankly indecent speed. We didn’t stop at launch either: we built in training, governance, and community spaces so the thing can grow without collapsing under its own weight.

Jonathan Phillips and Sabine Arnold on stage at IntraTeam
Lithos Partners’ Jonathan and SEFE’s Sabine Arnold at IntraTeam

As ever, the real value came from conversations in corridors. Susan Hanley’s SharePoint insights were especially useful (though, as someone about to dive into a new SP project, they also induced mild heart palpitations). Copilot agents are showing promise (but as ever the biggest challenges are in the human factor side of implementation), intranet governance is still the wild west, and the best strategy remains doing less, better.

After the main event, IntraTeam’s Kurt gathered a gang of us “invited experts” to discuss where the industry’s going. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it turned out to be the most valuable day of all. No slides, no sales pitches, just actual grown-up debate with some of the smartest people in the game.

And then, in an odd bit of narrative whiplash, I got blocked on LinkedIn.

Someone posted one of those “a bad intranet costs millions of dollars a year” type takes, based on the McKinsey stat about people spending 1.8 hours a day searching for information. You know the one. It did the rounds again, complete with some back-of-the-napkin maths and sweeping statements about the cost of poor digital experiences.

If you’re going to make the case for a better digital workplace, “time saved” isn’t going to cut it. Telling the CFO you’re saving five minutes a day is like telling a doctor you feel vaguely better. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s not a business case. Time spent searching is a symptom, not an outcome. Want to be taken seriously? Show how poor findability leads to risk, compliance failures, attrition.

So I said so. Politely. Succinctly. Then followed the LinkedIn prompt and turned my comment into a post. Got a ton of engagement—likes, nods, DMs… and then, boom. Blocked.

And interestingly (depressingly?), it’s not the first time. A few weeks ago another industry “influencer” responded to a (very polite) build I’d offered on one of their posts by… quietly deleting it. Poof. Gone. Not because I’d been rude or even really challenged their post, just because I’d dared to expand the conversation beyond a narrow comms focus.

And look, it’s their feed, they can do what they want. But if your response to professional critique is “lalala can’t hear you,” we have a problem. Our field doesn’t move forward by clapping along to every fluffy take.

If we’re not willing to have grown-up conversations about what good looks like (and doesn’t) then we don’t get to complain when we’re not seen as a business-critical function.

We do our industry a disservice when we treat criticism or challenge as a personal attack. If our default mode is cheerleading and groupthink, we’re not growing, we’re just echoing.

Disagreement isn’t disrespect. And blocking someone for calling out lazy thinking isn’t strength—it’s fragility.

Also this week

I also managed a quick visit to the Ocean exhibit at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. A stunning, immersive look at our relationship with the sea, blending science, art and activism in a way that somehow made me feel both awestruck and vaguely guilty.

Tonight’s the night: PowerPints, the PowerPoint-based comedy show. I submitted my slides Monday and promptly panicked about learning the thing. Enter ChatGPT, which turned out to be an unexpectedly brilliant rehearsal partner. Its dictate function can’t hear tone or pace, but it will sit quietly while I mumble at my screen for 10 minutes and offer some surprisingly helpful prompts to help me memorise my script.

Feeling ready. I’ll report back next week (unless I bomb spectacularly, in which case let’s all pretend this paragraph never happened).

(Still a few tickets left. If you’re in Amsterdam, come witness the chaos.)

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

I’m glad people are out there asking the important questions about emerging technologies. Such as “why DO so many AI company logos look like bumholes?”

📺 Watching

I’ve been too busy to watch anything this week, which has helped me manage the FOMO of knowing the final series of Handmaid’s Tale is out across the pond.

📚 Reading

Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five was brilliant, so I’ve leapt straight into her latest, Story Of A Murder. Only a few pages in, but I’m already hooked.

🎧 Listening

Delighted with the new Pulp single, like bumping into an old mate in a pub and realising they’re still cool as fuck.

Connections

IntraTeam was full of excellent humans, but the people-ing didn’t stop there. I caught up with UX designer Eugene (from The Breakfast) for coffee, had dinner with two of my Colombia travel crew in Copenhagen’s achingly hip Meatpacking district, and squeezed in a drink with Hiveonline’s Sofie Blakstad before my flight. 10/10 week for chats.

Flash Pack Colombia reunion

Travel

Nowhere next week. A rare and beautiful thing. But after that, it’s all systems go: London, Chicago, Toronto, Glasgow.

If you’re local to any of those, let’s grab a cuppa. Or a gin. I’m not fussy.

This week in photos

The engine and side of an orange and white EasyJet plane, on the tarmac with a clear blue sky
On the move again. AMS > CPH
A white woman with brown hair stands in front of a Microsoft sign. She is wearing sunglasses, a bright green top and a black jacket,
At the Microsoft offices in Copenhagen
An AI-generated picture of an action figure. The text says "Sharon O'Dea: Digital Workplace Expert"
The AI-generated action figure trend
A historic brown brick building with a mostly empty square in front. It has a clock tower on the top-left.
Copenhagen Radhuisplads
A selfie of two women - Sharon O'Dea and Sofie Blakstad.
With Sofie Blakstad in CPH
A Japanese-style stage in the background with a patch of daffodils in the foreground.
Finally visited Tivoli Gardens
A woman (me) surrounded by coloured lights in a dark room
Inside the Yayoi Kusama artwork at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Spring Saturdays in AMS

Making sense of SharePoint with out-of-the-box intranets

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It’s reckoned that 70% of intranets run on Microsoft SharePoint. It’s been the lead in the Gartner quadrants for enterprise content management and enterprise social for as long as either has been around. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that only once in my decade-long career as an intranet practitioner have I actually recommended to an organisation that they choose it.

That’s because while it’s packed with features and eternally popular with IT departments, it remains painfully difficult to deliver a simple, usable intranet with it. While it improves with every new edition – and 2016’s offering has made considerable steps forward in usability – the complexity and flexibility of this hydra of a product too often results in intranets that are over-complicated, ugly and hard to use.

The search continues to suck, the branding and customisation options limited, and the analytics it offers lags behind its rivals. Sure, it offers a lot of functionality – but much of it is stuff that few organisations want or need, merely making the intranet harder to use.

More often than not SharePoint intranets are an afterthought tacked on to any Office upgrade or rollout rather than actively chosen as a tool to deliver a best-in-class digital workplace and intranet. Where user research and planning does happen, and real investment is made in design, user experience and content, SharePoint can – and does – deliver truly great intranets.

Nine of the 10 intranets named as the world’s best in this year’s Neilsen Norman intranet design annual were SharePoint-based, as were around half of Intranet Innovation Awards winners. What sets these organisations apart is that they’ve invested planning and resources in really making a success of SharePoint – focusing on user needs, design and usability. But for everyone else this almost never happens.

So what do you do if you don’t have these resources and for whatever reason you’re stuck with SharePoint?

The last five years or so has seen the development of a wide range of products built on SharePoint that claim to quickly transform it into a useful, usable and fully-functioned intranet.

I was delighted to be given the opportunity to look more closely at a number of these products, as one of the team of reviewers for the second edition of SharePoint Intranets-in-a-Box, from Clearbox Consulting.

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The report looks at 26 of these products in all. They each had a slightly different focus and approach, but almost all delivered significant improvements in usability compared to a standard implementation. Some so much so that you hardly knew you were using SharePoint at all. Some products built on the SharePoint platform to deliver key transactional functionality for intranets, like HR or IT, while others had a heavier focus on enhancing and streamlining SharePoint for internal communications and engagement.

What they all had in common was the speed and ease of implementation. While the NNg award winners took an average of 1.3 years to deliver their intranets, out-of-the-box solutions can be up and running in days – or even hours. This makes it possible to deliver a decent intranet on top of SharePoint even with a limited budget and few development resources.

The SharePoint Intranets-in-a-Box report is out now. It’s packed full of practical advice and honest reviews (bad as well as good), and gives a useful overview of the available options at-a-glance. Between the team we’ve done over 200 hours of research to help you choose the right product for your requirements and budget.

Confession: I’d probably still recommend organisations starting from scratch consider alternatives. But as a self-confessed SharePoint Skeptic I’m delighted to see vendors come to the rescue for those who are tied into the Microsoft ecosystem, doing the hard work to make SharePoint suck less, so you don’t have to.

If you’ve read this far, reward yourself with 10% off the purchase price using my discount code IIAB2CBOX10.

Other blogs about Sharepoint Intranets-in-a-Box:

 

Intranets need to be a bit more fabulous

/ Sharon O'Dea / 4 Comments

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the Beauty Project, a celebration of all things beautiful at London’s Selfridges department store. There I listened to beauty columnist Sali Hughes talk to a panel of women about their experiences of – and different attitudes to – beauty.

While many deride the beauty industry as frivolous and superficial, for others make-up instills chameleon-like superpowers, giving them the confidence to go into any new context knowing they look the part.

As I returned to work the next day, it struck me what a depressingly under-appreciated quality beauty is in online experiences, and particularly in intranets. And how because we don’t apply make-up to our standard intranet faces, they suffer the fate of appearing unglamorous, dowdy and frequently unloved.

For a couple of years now I’ve been collecting intranet screenshots in a Pinterest board – over 230 so far. There are some great examples, but a lot of bad ones too.

It got me thinking: wouldn’t intranets be better if, like this weekend’s Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, they were just a little bit more fabulous?

Ugly sister

Intranets have historically been the poor cousin of the organisation’s website. They’re utilitarian things. Intranets often began life as a little side project, put together by someone in IT, built using clunky old tools. They served a purpose, but they didn’t do it very elegantly.  That purpose was usually communication, resulting in dense, ugly pages of text.

If you were really lucky, you’d get some icons. But these early intranets were no fun – they were serious stuff, and they had the rugged bad looks to show for it. These early intranets were managed, painfully, using tools like FrontPage and LotusNotes.

Early intranets were no lookers

Creating and managing intranets became easier with the widespread adoption of content management systems. Unfortunately, this often meant Sharepoint. Sharepoint is packed with functionality, but left a lot to be desired when it came to visual design. At the same time, few organisations gave much thought to the need for strong graphic design on an intranet. After all, it’s not like you’ll look anywhere else, is it? (Remember, at this time many organisations still routinely blocked web access for staff).

Over time, intranets got a little better, with text communications giving way to other content. Early attempts were made to try and engage users with more than just text, with the use of banners.

As intranets evolved, they began to provide a route through to key services, like HR, IT or room booking.  Problem was, these services were often designed by HR or IT people who didn’t give a great deal of thought to user experience, still less to visual design.

Text-heavy and dull, but early attempts were made to use imagery

Now intranets aren’t on the web, but they are of the web. And as websites became clearer and more engaging, so too – eventually – did intranets. Slowly.

Intranets began to be aligned more closely with an organisation’s brand, using more imagery, bolder fonts, and embracing the use of white space rather than trying to pack every available pixel with more internal communications.

Cinderella moment

But no intranet manager can escape the march of progress. In the first decade of this century, Apple emerged from its doldrums to become one of the dominant forces in technology. And it did this through making products that didn’t just do more, but also looked better than their rivals.

Functional and beautiful became the order of the day. And people loved it. The web stopped being a nerd’s hobby and became a way of life for almost everyone.

In just a few short years, we had a revolution in our hands. Almost all of us now has more powerful technology in our pockets than we do on our desktops. The consumerisation of IT made us all more demanding – we wanted better functionality, faster pages, but we demanded better visual design too. The ugly web just wasn’t good enough anymore.

Intranets have responded to the changing demands of their users with intranets that offer utility as well as communication, in a form that approaches some of the cutting-edge cross-platform design we see on the wider web. This means offering communication and services that don’t just work, but also engage.

Intranets have begun to learn from the best of website design

Embracing the power of imagery

Once freed from the shackles of slow connection speeds, the web has quickly become more visual as brands began to recognise the power of imagery.

We process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, and because of that  images have become the currency of social media. They can instantly inform, intrigue, inspire, delight or capture the imagination of those that engage with them.

That’s because they affect us in two ways: cognitively, they expedite and increase our level of comprehension, recollection and recognition. But they also work emotionally, enhancing or affecting an emotional response.

And they do that in the blink of an eye. Following the lead of websites and social media, more intranets are making the most of visual assets to inform and engage, and tell their brand story.

Reaping the rewards 

And that’s because there are strong business drivers to do so. Organisations have long realised the impact an ugly office has on morale and productivity. Studies have shown that a well designed work environment improves productivity by anything up to 50%, increases job satisfaction by 24%.

Organisations invest time and money in making their offices look good, even if they’re not client-facing, because they know it makes business sense. But as the digital workplace becomes the place where we got to get work done, it follows that the same is true in our online environments too.

If the primary place that you do your work is online, then making that digital workplace one that people want to work in will have huge benefits in productivity and engagement.

As more of us work flexibly supported by a digital workplace, then the intranet becomes the primary way that we experience and understand our employer brand.

By connecting employees with the organisation’s brand and vision using both content and design, good-looking intranets create more engaged employees. Better looking intranets can have a big impact on their business outcomes.

The times, they are a-changin’

It’s encouraging, then to see intranets finally embracing the power of beauty. This year’s My Beautiful Intranet competition, the Digital Workplace Group’s annual intranet beauty parade,  is already seeing a steady stream of entries – and they’re a million miles away from the out-of-the-box ugliness that’s plagued the industry for two long.

Dense blocks of text, tiny images and 1990s styling has been replaced with big, blod and on-brand design on par with some of the best web sites around.

The competition is still open for entries – take a look, vote for your favourites or submit your own. I’m on the judging panel this year, and am looking forward to seeing more.

Is there more to life than being really, ridiculously good looking?

Of course a great intranet can’t just be about form over function. But by combining form and function, pairing great functionality with an interface that functions well and looks good, we create intranets that have a huge impact on engagement and productivity – and are really loved by our users.

Declining trust defines new role for intranets

/ Sharon O'Dea / 3 Comments

Trust

The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer, published last week, finds a deepening sense of distrust in governments, businesses and institutions. The annual global study, which questioned 30,000 people in 25 countries, reveals a dramatic shift in the value people place in information sources – which, in turn, has some interesting implications for communicators and intranet managers.

Across the globe, blame for the financial and political chaos of 2011 landed at the doorstep of government, as trust in that institution fell nine points to 43 per cent. In seventeen of the 25 countries surveyed, government is now trusted by less than half to do what is right. In twelve, it trails business, media and non-governmental organizations as the least trusted institution.

The private sector fared slightly better: trust in business fell from 56 percent to 53 percent, with countries like France and Germany, in the heart of the Eurozone economic crisis, experiencing double-digit decreases.

“Business is now better placed than government to lead the way out of the trust crisis,” said CEO Richard Edelman. “But the balance must change so that business is seen both as a force for good and an engine for profit.”

One of the biggest changes over the past year is the decline in trust in CEOs, which fell by 12 points. Faith in government officials fell like a stone too this year, down 14 points to just 29 per cent. It’s not unreasonable to assume this is reflected inside organisations too, so many will want to look again at CEO blogs as a means of increasing visability and trust in senior leadership. Over on Intranetizen, Jonathan gives some sterling advice on making executive blogs work.

Employee advocacy could be one way out of the mire. The survey found that credibility in average employees rose dramatically this year, so they are now the most trusted resource within an organisation. To capitalise on this, organisations must work harder to ensure their employees are informed and engaged – and then trust them to talk on the company’s behalf. This approach – what Edelman call radical transparancy – empowers employees to drive the conversation amongst their peers.

But to do this, organisations and leaders need to trust their employees first; companies which block access to social networks are preventing their employees from advocating on their behalf, and so missing a huge opportunity to engage with customers.

The barometer found people need to hear the same information about a company three to five times before they will believe it. This emphasises the importance of a proper communciations strategy which mixes on and offline channels to ensure the message gets out there. 

At the same time, trust in social networks as sources of information grew  by 75 per cent over the past year. Smart companies, then, will take advantage of this and embrace the value of conversations (by employees and the public) as a means of establishing identity and trust.

One corollary of this is that the growth in use of social networks, both internally and externally, means news travels fast. Employees can easily find information about their own company online, and all too often will hear (and believe) news from external sources before they do from their own manager.

This has huge implications for company transparency; corporate communciations structures need to keep pace with the changes. A good, social intranet – and improved access to these from a range of devices – gives organisations the means by which they can get their message to staff before they hear it from elsewhere. But this isn’t just a case of building it – leadership buy-in, and changes to the way corporate comms work with social intranets are essential to make it work.

Edelman’s report sets out long- and short-term approaches to rebuilding trust. In the short term, trust in a business is firmly tied to the bottom line. But future trust is more strongly linked to softer, societally-focused factors such as business ethics, placing customers ahead of profits and treating employees well. In the current environment, informed, engaged employees are best placed to communicate that message to the public – and intranets have a vital role to play in building that engagement.

Photo credit: Thorinside on Flickr

The (anti) social intranet at #ukgc12

/ Sharon O'Dea / 5 Comments

Social intranet session

While UKGovCamp overwhelmingly focuses on how we use digital to engage with the public and improve public services, I firmly believe that to make that happen we also have to make public authorities themselves work better. So I was keen to have a session on intranets.

Fortunately, so was Stuart Murdoch of Surevine. It turned out to be a popular topic – so much so that we had to get a much bigger room. Stuart’s take on things was rather different from mine; he’s introduced social intranets at many organisations, and is a firm believer in social to make a better digital workplace.

Whereas I’m more critical of social for social’s sake, and feel the real value for intranets over the next 3-5 years is in transactional, making the intranet deliver real business value and helping people to do their jobs better. So this made for quite a lively debate, and we all had plenty to say.

Stuart contends that people are the most important part of intranets. I’d agree that the focus is fast moving away from documents and policies; content is no longer king, and the intranet is no longer simply a vast repository of HR documentation. Nor, the group felt, was the primary role of the intranet to push information at people.

A couple of people talked about the value of building a community around information. It’s one thing publishing hundreds of pages of HR policies, but barely anyone will be bothered to look for them. The social intranet could enable people to ask questions, and get answers from internal experts, who can then signpost them to information or resources they need.

One person suggested that “social can help you find the people in your organisation who can help you do your project”.

However, this is based on a simple fallacy; that these people want to be found. In almost all cases, in large organisations people are heavily silo-ed. An individual’s objectives relate entirely to the team or department they work in. Their performance will be measured on this, and in many companies (particularly in financial services) individuals will get financial rewards based on the value they deliver to their own team and projects – not anyone else’s.

If you work in Group Risk and someone rings you up out of the blue, having spotted that you speak Russian in the company expertise finder, you have no particular incentive to drop what you’re doing and help, do you?

Next we moved on to the question of what the intranet is and who it’s for. This isn’t as straightforward as it once was. Local authority intranets, for example, deliver content to council employees. But as departments are being merged into cross-borough shared services, and private firms and voluntary sector firms take on the role of service delivery, the simple question of who is the audience for an intranet isn’t at all clear-cut.

In such a diverse landscape, the one-size-fits-all intranet is no longer sufficient. Dan Harrison suggested we move beyond the idea of the intranet; the internet includes millions of sites, so why should the workplace web have only one? The answer is the heterogenous intranet, comprised of a variety of sites and services that meet the diverse needs of users.

Another participant gave the example of the RAF, which has different levels of intra- and extranet sites with different groups given access to each according to user need, blurring the boundaries between internal and external sites.

On the Twitter backchannel, Alex Manchester suggested the city as a metaphor for the digital workplace, with different suburbs and neighbourhoods that people visit for different reasons. Think of the corporate front page news as Piccadilly Circus, collaboration as Shoreditch, and the HR policy pages as Pinner.

We moved on to the question of how you encourage people to participate in social intranets. Most were, like me, pretty cynical about gamification, asking what value it delivers for either the individual or the organisation.

A few participants noted bottom-up, grassroots solutions often had more traction than corporately imposed ones. One example given was where a Yammer pilot was replaced with a corporate (Sharepoint) tool that quickly fell flat.

But bottom-up solutions often exist for a reason; where people find the tools they’re given at work aren’t up to the job, they’ll find their own – whether that’s using their Gmail due to tiny inbox sizes, or starting a Yammer network to collaborate on a project.

The key difference with grassroots solutions and small-scale pilots is that they are allowed to quietly fail. This process of trial and error enables people to find the right solutions that marry technology to organisational culture – a process that a big Sharepoint project is rarely able to go through.

A big variable here is organisational demographics; different solutions are needed for organisations full of knowledge workers and those with a high proportion of workers out on the coalface. But for both types (and all those in-between), the question of whether social functionality is what people actually want or need should really be asked before top-solutions are imposed.

Social is not an outcome. Making the organisation work better should be the desired outcome (measured in money saved, projects completed more quickly, enquiries dealt with, etc.). Social functionality can be part of the solution, but should fit alongside redesign of processes to make the intranet deliver real business value and efficiency.

Networking for #intranet managers

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In my latest post over at Intranetizen, I’ve pulled together my recommendations for intranet pros on networking with others in the industry.

Always one to eat my own dogfood, this week we’re holding the fourth Internal Communications Teacamp. The theme this time around is internal comms and employee engagement.

As ever, IC Teacamp is open to all internal communciations practitioners, in any industry or discipline. No need to book or RSVP – just come along to Cafe Zest, on the second floor of House of Fraser in Victoria Street SW1, from 4pm tomorrow (18th January).

If you can’t make it, follow the action on the #iceteacamp hashtag.