If you’re in a difficult and political environment I’d recommend focusing on Strategy & Governance or Metrics & Performance.

This gives your intranet team and stakeholders the vocabulary and data you need to zoom in on poorly performing areas and take specific action. DWG’s benchmarks are split into eight areas, each of which is measured against the average for peer organizations. What should you look at first? Well, clearly the areas that need improving most. There are choices to be made on limited resources, but senior leadership, internal communications, the brand guys and IT will have very different views on priorities. The intranet means lots of different things to lots of different people. Usability is close to the heat, as is Communication & Collaboration, as it relates much more closely to the capabilities that you offer across your intranet. “Look I told you so.” All intranet people have been there, pointing at the fire as it rages out of control while a committee politely declines your funding request for a fire extinguisher. It gives them a clear and demonstrable positioning against their peers from the point of view of the user, as well as specific recommendations to improve matters in the short term. This is typically the first port of call for new members and why they choose Usability as the area to benchmark. But you need to show just how bad things are. I like to think of these as the four Ps: Pain The organization that doesn’t have strong foundations here is likely to perform poorly elsewhere.īut if you’re new to DWG membership and considering that all-important first benchmark there are other things you might consider important. In that post I made it clear that the prince of these areas, according to the data, is Strategy & Governance. In my previous post I explained how DWG benchmarks intranets across four models covering all of these management practices. Can a detailed statistical analysis of benchmarking data help time-pressed intranet managers keep those plates spinning? This is an area I looked at recently in a research report for DWG members, entitled “Evidence-based intranet success”. You need to focus your attention on where you can make the right impact. If you’re responsible for an intranet your time will be stretched to its limit as you try to keep all the plates spinning. In reality, we all know it’s a very hard task indeed.

I like to say that creating a truly great intranet is easy: you just need to get hundreds of people within your organization to run a few dozen processes smoothly for maybe three years.

Benchmark intranet