Hits and page views won't tell you if your Intranet is working

A few years ago I learned a very imporant lesson: we stopped organizing content aroud our organizational chart, and started organizing it around common work projects, key processes and roles. Making this move lets our  intranet be much more flexible and effective. After all-- organizations change, but what the company is doing and the type of roles who come together to do it...that tends to stay the same.

We have seen more success from the newer way of working with navigation.
How do we know? Well... our 'channel measurement' numbers improved (that's usage like views, time on site, particular content, as well as user ratings for satisfaction on the Intarnet).

But maybe more importantly we learned that we have to build our Intranet around our users.

We've taken this learning and leveraged it. Today our understanding of key groups is used to help us design and execute more strategic and measurably more successful communication strategies-- which include the Intranet as one of the tactics. 

Personally, I think you just can't measure success just by looking at what's happening on your Intranet, you need to look at the bigger operational behaviors. From my point of view, my role is to help the Intranet synch with smart internal communication strategies: this means looking at what problems and opportunities there are, teaming with functional parts of the business, and together creating stragetic, well-orchestratic communication & information plans -- that include the Intranet-- that help the business learn, grow and do better.

Because what do page views mean anyway?
What do you think? How are you measuring the success of your Intarnet?

"I know I should be communicating, but I’m not..."

I haven’t blogged in a while.
Four months to be exact.
And my tweets over the last weeks are noticably fewer.
My rationale has been: I am going through a lot of change right now. I should be extra careful about what I say and plus…. I’m really, really busy. (Sound familiar?)

In reality, my change isn’t really all that big or different than changes that happen all of the time: I’ve recently got myself into a new project at work that has more responsibility doing something that I’m very, very passionate about. But the transition felt tough for me. Lots of juggling. Lots of times when it was unclear if it would work out.

Frankly I was a little afraid of saying "too much" by blogging during this change.
(And for sure, there was extra work juggling the new opportunity and managing my old work.)

As a professional communicator—if I had met me during this change—I would have coached with all kinds of questions like:
- Couldn’t you use your blog as a tool for reflection during the change?
- Couldn’t it be part of an overall approach to stay connected with friends and colleagues?
- Couldn’t it help you cope and make sense with all of the change?
- Couldn’t the blog help you get connected to others who might be able to support?

I knew all of this. Still I couldn’t…. I didn’t.
The very good thing about this for me is having the experience.
Now I’ve personally connected with how lots of business leaders feel as they implement and guide organizational change. My own empathy has grown for the mindset that says, “I get it that we should be communicating more, and being more transparent... but it's difficult. Something holds me back.”
That's a pretty good experience to be able to relate to. Don't you think?