United States : Intranet strategy with collaboration products ensures fresh content.

Building an intranet to house static content such as an employee directory and benefits forms can make a portal as dated as a corporate brochure. Making unified communications (UC) tools -- collaboration applications, wikis, micro-blogs -- part of an intranet strategy helps portals evolve with employee needs.

"We reach a point now, increasingly, where we've got this tension going on -- we've got this intranet, and somewhere else we've got this collaboration going on, and that's an unsatisfactory state of affairs because it can only confuse employees," said Tim Walters, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "What you'd like to do is join these two. Tear down the barrier."

Enterprises invest significant time and money in developing dynamic websites for the Internet, he said, but they often fail to see the value of creating an intranet that is equally vibrant.

"That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's just internal, so we don't really have to care if it's useful or usable, never mind if it's desirable."

Senior analyst, Forrester Research Inc.

"That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's just internal, so we don't really have to care if it's useful or usable, never mind if it's desirable," Walters said. "Not many people use it or actively resist using it."

" But to make business processes faster, more efficient, more productive -- and ultimately ensure that prospects and customers are better served by the entire organization -- collaboration products need to be part of an intranet strategy ," Walters wrote in a recent Forrester research note, What's Holding Back Your Intranet?

An intranet strategy shouldn't be one size fits all

Beth Gleba, corporate information manager for IKEA North America, has watched the Swedish furniture retailer's intranet go from one-dimensional to award-winning in the past eight years. One essential first step was to identify that one intranet can't serve the needs of every employee. There should be individual community spaces for different groups of employees.

"It took about three years for us to become better at segmenting coworker audiences and information needs," Gleba said. "This practice really helped us move forward and learn how to use our intranet for multiple purposes: distributing very broad information for everyone but also target ing info to key groups or communities that may have just a handful of people at each location."

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