The Most Important Intranet Section So Far

Today City of Malmö launched the new job role section “Manager”. This part of the intranet will provide work support for 1100 managers in the organisation.

This is the 14th job role on the intranet. Since before we have special sections for HR, Comms, IT and Economy employees (the classic administrative job roles in every organisation), special sections for the big core responsibilities in a Swedish municipality—Schools & education, Elderly care and Social services, plus a few other job roles.

Segmenting content in job roles is to target content based on the jobs that staff perform, different job roles have different content needs. I always describe the pages in a job role as “200 pages of expert support especially for your profession”. This is cutting the content horizontally, so to say. Another way of segmenting is to cut the content vertically—segment in business units—and City of Malmö also does this on the intranet, we have 18 business unit sections. Our intranet was a winner in the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards for this solution and the implementation of it, with free, voluntary end-user personalization reaching 80% in the organisation.

Together, the business units and job roles gives the employee hundreds of different possibilities to personalize the intranet to his or her liking. Myself I have the business unit “City office” and the job roles “Communications” and “Manager”. (Yes, one can have several business units and job roles if one wants to.) This way the intranet provides me with content relevant for me based on my organisational affinity and content that makes me efficient in my profession(s).

In my opinion the new job role “Manager” is the most important section so far on the intranet. Getting ONE place for communicating with all managers across the organisation, providing comprehensive support for them and helping them become more efficient in the work day is paramount for City of Malmö. And now we have this on the intranet! This have been one of my major intranet goals for the last six years.

I also think a bonus will come in the future because of this. Ten years ago, when I was a newly appointed intranet manager at City of Malmö, I lamented the fact that the intranet usage at that time was so low in the organisation. The IT manager replied: “Jesper, it took ten years for email to take hold in our organisation. And do you know when it happened? When the managers saw the point with it.”

Today many managers already understad the value of the intranet. But with a specialized area just for managers, I think the intranet will in the end be perceived as truly essential in the organisation.