Having a good governance framework supporting your strategy helps you to manage your intranet better. The benefits people using the intranet will experience include:
- Consistently good experience whenever they access it
- Confident they can rely on the information
- Reassured by the integrity of the information and apps
- Quickly find what they need
- The intranet is the best way to help with their work
- They can see the value of using it
However, intranet stakeholders will need more than good words about the benefits. They need to see the case for investing in it as well. That means making a financial case based on measurable benefits. Having a well-managed intranet helps make it easier to identify and measure the benefits.
How will you answer with confidence the questions that people ask you starting with “Why…?” or “How…?” or “What…? and their statements starting with “You can’t…, You shouldn’t…, You won’t…, That’s not possible…”
There are different benefits you can measure. While they include traditional financial “return on investment” (ROI) benefits, they extend beyond that to wider benefits that good governance can support to cover:
- financial benefits that impact on the bottom line of your organisation’s financial results
- quantified non-financial benefits, such as improved productivity
- unquantified non-financial benefits such as culture changes
Some of these may be familiar to you. However, how you can use them, may be novel. They will help show wider benefits you had not considered before. This is especially so if you can combine these
It seems to be the larger the amount of benefits, the more difficult it is to measure accurately and to a level of confidence, that can convince your stakeholders! The best chance of succeeding is to determine the method that will be most effective for measuring the benefits for your own particular audience.
It is what you measure, how you measure it and how you demonstrate the benefits. That is critical to gain the support you need for, and the understanding of, good governance.
Providing clear examples that senior stakeholders accept helps you to get their attention and support when you demonstrate how your intranet is critical and beneficial to your organisation.
Lastly, you have a better idea what it is that you can measure and avoid wasting time trying to find out something that is very difficult. You need to decide on the benefits you will measure, the way that you measure, and how you explain and show the results, that will help you to improve your intranet.
Without this, the full value of the strategy and governance framework you have worked so hard to implement will be unknown. It is vital to show the benefits to justify the work you have done and to plan with confidence for further improvements based on the success of your intranet to your organisation so far.