Are your intranet standards 'smart'?

Are your intranet standards ‘smart’?

August 21, 2012 at 8:09 am | Posted in benchmark, best practice, content management, governance, intranet, publishing, standards, usability | 2 Comments
Tags: accessibility, best practice, governance, intranet, publishing, standards, training, usability, value

I have reviewed many intranets and have been amazed at the variety of publishing standards and how they are enforced. These vary from no publishing standards through to everything being locked down depending on the importance of complying with standards. More importantly it is the amount of time, effort, and money that is used to enforce people to comply with the standards when they publish information.

I sometimes think organisations lose the plot and forget to look at the costs being spent for the benefit being gained.

Your intranet needs standards to make sure your organisation complies with business, user, regulatory, and legal requirements in any country it operates in. The best approach is to have ‘smart’ standards that need the minimum time, effort, and cost which achieving the maximum effectiveness and benefits. How many of these questions can you answer “yes” to?

Do you train your publishers on what your intranet standards?
Do you also train your publishers on why your intranet has these standards?
Do you educate and support your publishers with guidance to understand more about your standards?
Do you embed any of your standards in the publishing templates e.g. branding, navigation menu?
Do publishers need to comply with your standards before their content is published e.g. images need to have alternative texts before they can be used?
Do you review content for compliance?
Do you remind your publishers if their content is non-compliant?
Do you remove content if no action by your publishers to comply?
Do you measure how compliant your intranet is?
Have you measured it more than once?

If you answered “yes” to all these questions then award yourself a gold medal!

If you answered “no” to any of these questions perhaps you had better contact me?

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