If you run an intranet in a big organization, you probably need to explore intranet personalization, tailoring and targeting, because the ordinary employee doesn’t need 14,000 pages for getting the work done.
Tailoring is explained in this article by James Robertson. He speaks about three “facets” to use:
- geographic location
- business unit
- job role
Geographic location is about targeting based on continent, region, country, or—in our case—city. Our intranet at Region Skåne has news feeds for the ten cities/sites where we have hospitals. Focus in these feeds is things that happen in the hospital area and building.
In the intranet onboarding, every employee is asked what geographic location s/he belongs to. It is possible to chose several locations if you work at two or more places, but of course most people only choose one.
Business unit is about targeting according to the part of the organization you belong to. This is especially effective in big organizations, similar to business groups. Region Skåne is divided into 11 “subsidiaries”, each with its own CEO, administration and comms office. In the picture above you can see the news feed for the subsidiary “Skåne University Health Care”.
A question about business unit affiliation is also in the intranet onboarding process. The onboarding suggests the right business unit for you based on your Active Directory data. Again it is possible to choose more than one, if one like/need this.
Business unit is sometimes also visible on our basic content pages, since some of our basic routines differ.
Job role is the most complicated facet, but the one with most potential.
Targeting by job role is the most challenging approach. Across a whole organisation, there are likely to be hundreds of different job roles, with varying needs. Individual job roles may not be very well defined, with a single role such as “Project officer” having many different responsibilities, or similar roles having different names.
James Robertson, “Designing Intranets”, p 229.
Today we have eight job roles, and we are building more. Every job role consists of a tile on the homepage (we call it a “shop window”) and a section “underneath” (the full, specialized “store”). You get the tile(s) you choose in the onboardning.
In the onboarding process the intranet asks what job role you would like to have. We can suggest the right role thanks to Swedish heath care regulations meaning every employee belonging to one of ≈200 standardized occupation ID:s, which we get from the Active Directory. This means that e.g. a nurse or a manager can simply accept what the system suggests in the onboarding. Again it is possible to choose more than one job role, if one like/need this (but maybe not all roles, as I have chosen above…:-).
My opinion is job role content is the “rocket fuel” for an intranet. Yes, global content like basic info about leave, how to book a room etc is important and the start for every intranet. But local content, tailored content for a special target group, has the potential to be extremely useful for exactly that group. In the long run, this content also has the potential to be the largest part of the intranet.
In the global core structure (reachable through the masthead menu button and the bigfoot) all employees can read about how to participate in the yearly employee appraisal activity. Below an example of the “shop” for managers. In this section a managers finds info about how to lead the employee appraisal and what to do in the next process step.
Below is the “shop” for nurses. Right now it’s ≈75 things nurses really need when treating patients. This job role has been built by key colleagues at the largest health care subsidiary, for really getting the right content.
Tangible support for nurses, supporting the moment of truth, potentially contributing to saving patients lives in stressful situations thanks to to great findability! This is how to really make a difference as an intranet!
Jesper Bylund – Intranet Manager 