Organizing Your Global Corporate Intranet

by Indi Young

November 10, 2006

In our line of business, we’re often asked to help corporations reorganize their employee intranets. With the permission of our generous clients, here are some examples of best practices that you can use as a guide the next time you tackle an intranet redesign.

Global Corporations

“Are we too US-centric?” This question is on the minds of every US client that we talk to. International companies rely upon their intranets to help customers and employees in other countries communicate. As such, it’s important to make sure your intranet provides information that is appropriate for all its users.

To address this challenge, Adaptive Path has conducted a great deal of task-analysis research. We have found that corporations across international boundaries tend to operate quite similarly. All businesses must pay their employees and make arrangements with employees who are departing or retiring. In some countries, businesses also contribute to employees’ retirement savings, as well as the costs of health care, training and education. Some employees make use of company cars; most require a physical place to work, along with telephones and computer equipment. Employees also need time off to deal with life events (such as births and deaths in the family), civic duties and sick days. Employees also need holiday time.

While most company responsibilities are basically the same, local laws dictate that certain company policies differ. In the UK and Canada, health care is socialized, so businesses are not required to provide health insurance. But because socialized healthcare isn’t exactly the most efficient approach, the better companies offer their employees private health insurance. In Southeast Asia, some governments require businesses to give employees monetary gifts for the birth of a child. In Germany, the national retirement pension system is in trouble, so businesses are starting to set up private retirement funds for their employees.

You can see that, even though companies in different countries adhere to local regulations, the structures for retaining and supporting employees are universal. Healthcare, time off, retirement, equipment needs, training and so on are central areas of interest even though individual policies and features may differ from country to country. Therefore you can confidently organize your intranet around these global topics.

Relationship to the Company

The easiest way to organize your intranet is to map it to the tasks a typical employee hopes to accomplish:

• Investigate a Job Opportunity & Make a Job Decision
• Come On Board & Possibly Relocate
• Understand Benefits Package, Set Up Paycheck, Enroll in Health Coverage, Sign Up for Retirement Plan
• Manage Retirement Funds, Contribute to Savings Plan(s)
• Verify Pay & Employee Records
• Take Time Off
• Record Work Hours
• Plan Training
• Take Part in Reviews
• Adjust Work Schedule/Location or Change Jobs within Company
• Prepare to Retire
• Leave the Company
• Participate in Company Social Events

You can round out the list by adding any areas of interest unique to your company. For example, a biotech company might want to offer its employees an “Industry Research” option.

Relationship to a Work Group

Employees also have a direct relationship to the group they report to within the company. This relationship is usually defined in terms of the responsibilities of the immediate group, such as Marketing, Legal or IT. These areas of your intranet probably already exist as independent pools of specialized, highly utilized information and tools. Usually the architecture of these pools grows directly out of the specific needs of that group, so it already works fairly well for the people who are using it; in this case, you don’t need to mess with the architecture unless the group really requires additional help.

The Intranet Business Park

Many companies try to set up their intranet as a monolithic site, packed with absolutely every tool and piece of information imaginable. This approach leads to extremely unwieldy navigation schemes. If you try to include everything, even details that apply only to specialized work groups, you create a confusion of links that most employees will never need. For example, an engineer is unlikely to use sales, marketing or legal content on a regular basis.

Instead of the monolith, adopt a corporate campus approach. In the physical world, a corporate campus usually features individual buildings dedicated to separate uses, with nice landscaping in between. Some of the buildings require special security access to enter, but if an employee has a meeting in one of these secure buildings, there is a process in place that allows that employee inside the door. The same approach works when it comes to your intranet. For example, separate the Learning “building” from the Sales “building,” then build a Human Resources structure up front that everyone can access. Construct a process that, for instance, allows engineers to look at only the documents in the Legal department that apply to them.

To tie the campus intranet together, provide a “shuttle station” in the utility navigation to help people get from building to building. Visitors in the Human Resources building can simply click over to the shuttle station and choose a different destination. We can do this because folks usually spend most of their time in one of the buildings. Because folks usually spend most of their intranet time inside their work group area, they do not need to have every other option available in the primary navigation.

The primary navigation of each individual building can then focus on the specific topic at hand. For example, the navigation items for the Human Resources building might be the same as those listed under “Relationship to the Company,” above.

Clarify Your Intranet Architecture

Intranets can be confusing jumbles of information, especially when it comes to global companies. Following these tips for each virtual campus across the globe will help your employees access the information they need. And if they can access this information easily, they are more likely to use and add to an intranet.

Indi Young is one of the founders of Adaptive Path. Currently she is writing a book about mental models.