Introduction

I have highlighted in Chapter 1 that although the intranet supports many processes that may have a workflow element its scope is not defined by processes in the same way as financial, HR, logistics and other applications. Because each employee assesses the value of a piece of information in a different way from any other employee in the organization, probably the most challenging issue for an intranet manager is defining the user requirements for the intranet, both currently and in the near future.

It is for this reason that this chapter on defining user requirements comes so early in the book. Everything else, from the selection of technology to the governance structure, and from the content strategy to performance evaluation, has to be based on user requirements. Just because all the users will be employees of the organization does not make the task any easier, because they will have very high expectations that the intranet will be of significant value to them.

This chapter focuses on techniques which are of value either in the case of the initial launch of an intranet, or when the need for a major programme of enhancement is identified from regular monitoring of the value and impact of the intranet, as described in Chapter 15. The chapter does not cover the translation of these user requirements into the design of the architecture of the intranet, a subject outside the scope of this book but covered in detail by James Robertson's Designing Intranets

The solution is personalization!

A number of organizations have taken the view that the ideal way to solve the problems of information overload and providing only what is relevant to an individual employee is to use portal technology to provide a personalized view of the information on an intranet. In theory this is an excellent idea, but in practice there are some fundamental problems: