One of the things we’ve built on our new Region Skåne intranet is the possibility to target different internal job roles with unique content. This follows the Step Two model for segmentation of local content (content relevant for some, but not all, in the organisation).
Our take on this is as follows:
1) When the user access the intranet the first time s/he is required to finish an onboarding process.
2) In the onboarding process, the intranet asks you three questions:
- What is your division/subsidiary?
- Where (geographically) do you work?
- What is your job role?
This data is stored in the user’s intranet profile.
When possible, some choices are pre-checked in the onboarding process. We use data from the central AD and in some cases the system can auto-suggest the right division/subsidiary and the right job role. We have, for example, been able to pinpoint every manager within the organisation and pre-check the job role ”Manager” for them (≈2,000 employees).
Our users are free to change all onboarding choices, and it is also possible to give multiple answers (e.g. if you split your work time between two divisions, or you have two different job roles).
3) After the onboarding the user starts using the intranet. The intranet homepage—”My homepage”—is personalised and delivers tiles based on the intranet profile data. As you can see in the picture below the three onboarding choices are used several times.
The user in this example is a healthcare unit manager and has the intranet profile data set to ”job role: manager”. Therefore she sees the tile ”My job role: Manager”.
The job role tile is a small ”shop window” leading to a section with more than one hundred pages about manager tasks, for example:
- ”How to conduct a performance review”,
- ”How to recruit a new employee”,
- ”How to act and what to register when an employee is on long-term sick-leave”,
- ”How to handle the unit budget”.
Content like this is very much needed by managers in our organisation! Therefore it’s a good thing we’re able to deliver this directly on the homepage, in a single access place. (This content was sprinkled all over the old intranet, hard to find for managers and disturbing non-managers. ”Is this info really for me???”)
The REALLY elegant part of this solution is that when the manager do a search action for something on the intranet s/he will get results from this section. At the same time, an ordinary employee will NOT see the shop window or get any search results from this section. Even if the manager searches with only one word the search engine automatically adds your intranet profile data in the search query, making the search results better. Think of it as a personal auto-filtering of the search results.
We have more job role sections coming. The job role ”Communications officer” is already in use (≈100 employees). ”HR expert” will be built this winter (=400 employees), as will ”Economy expert” (≈300 employees).
Another example of different information needs: The comms officer needs the InDesign file for making a brochure, the design manual and the logo eps file. Other employees should NOT make their own brochures, if they search for that word the intranet should instead deliver a page recommending Don’t do a brochure yourself. Go see a communications officer.
Job roles with extremely big potential are ”Nurse” (≈9,000 employees), ”Assistant nurse (≈6,000 employees) and ”Physician” (≈5,700 employees). We have them already classified in the intranet onboarding process, but today we show no job role content for them. (We have a lot of basic, good content for healthcare personnel on the intranet, but this content is not personalised.) Here, the job role content creation work is harder. Healthcare in Sweden is decentralised and it is sometimes difficult to find the right sender of content. This is work in progress, hopefully we will have some good content for physicians later this year.
In the end, the personalisation features on our new intranet gives the intranet team the possibility to better target content to the right end-users. This, together with digital work spaces for units, has made it possible to strip the core content structure down to less than 500 global pages (from 15,000 on the old intranet).
And, you know, this is what the intranet team work is all about: information control, not broadcast!
Jesper Bylund – Intranet Manager 