Focusing on Outcomes and Experiences When Implementing Intranets

Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

SharePoint specialist Susan Hanley offered intranet implementation best practices during her presentation at KMWorld Connect 2020.

"No one, no one, not even an independent consultant like me works in isolation. Most people work as part of an organization. And so while individuals have key outcome goals, so do organizations. And I think it's important when we're thinking about investing in intranet to understand the big rock goals for the organization that tend to drive both behaviors and investments," said Hanley.

The organization's top goal should be to support its own intranet, she recommended, because the intranet is really the foundation on which you can build an exceptional digital workplace.

"But in order to do that, you need to not just focus on the technology, but really on the scenarios and the outcomes that you will enable with the technology," Hanley said.

The roadmap created for supporting the intranet really needs to think about all of the services necessary to solve core business outcomes. 

"What I want to think about is to showcase what users can do, not what workloads they need to deploy. There are a lot of apps in the suite and while teams is sort of Microsoft's hero for team collaboration, work teams, isn't the only tool in your tool suite, or may not be the only application you use in your Workday. And I usually think about trying to speak about what are you trying to accomplish from an experience perspective and for whom are we trying to accomplish it? Is it for me? Is it for me our team, or is it for us the organization? And rather than speaking about one drive, here's what it does," Hanley said.