When I talk to intranet professionals it seems to me that there is not enough focus on numbers. Projects, meetings, e-mails, issues with technology and vendors all detract time from measurement. Intranet numbers make management happy, but can also assist your planning and identify your intranet potential more clearly.
In terms of working with measurements, the people behind even some of the best intranets are essentially only doing basic intranet math. Conducting focus groups or other qualitative research can be helpful, but you also need some hard numbers. Collecting data about your intranet will take time and turning the data into informed actions will equally require an effort. How do you demonstrate that the intranet is creating business value without this intelligence?
There is likely to be some obvious easy improvements even without lots of supporting numbers, you probably already have an opinion of what could be improved. Only actual numbers can confirm whether your assumptions are correct.
Depending on where you want to take the intranet, different numbers will be important. To some the number of visitors or number of editors will be a key metric. Others might be more focused on the more complex task of trying to tap into some of the unexploited financial value of the intranet.
One of our member organisations; a Danish government agency made improvements to the navigation on their intranet. By doing so they saved over €15,000 in lost time.
Remember that no matter how strategic you think the intranet is, if you don’t have any numbers that shows it, it does not play out.
Which numbers do you track for your intranet?
Next step for your intranet
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Jürgen Mirbach September 21st, 2009 17:58
Dear Janus,
working with key indicators is an invalueable help on our way to achieve our goals. I perfectly agree with you that some numbers should be traced. Since we consult our clients in evaluating their internal media – no surprise. Thank you for your assist.
My 5Cent: It’s important to stress that the numbers should fit the goals to be achieved. You wrote it, but bold print would be applicable: just concentrate on some numbers not a hundred. Doing the math shouldn’t take too much time. Sounds obvious, but it isn’t.
I disagree with presenting saved time as Euros, though. In seminars, we often discuss that. If you see the money on an account, that’s great and I’m with you – without accounting, it’s “just” time and it’s up to staff what they do with it. Saving time is great and it should be very much appreciated as saved time.
Cheers,
Jürgen
Mark Morrell September 23rd, 2009 17:58
Janus,
Great post! All intranet managers should be interested in this with the extra pressures a recession brings on justifying investment.
I posted about a methodology BT has used to value our intranet similar to how brand values are given.
BT worked out the value of our intranet comes to 000s of millions of £s. Read more at http://markmorrell.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/i-know-what-bt%e2%80%99s-intranet-is-worth-what-about-yours/.
Mark
Harry Chittenden September 23rd, 2009 17:58
If your intranet is connected to the Internet, you can track its activity via the free analytics tool, Google Analytics or any other tracking tool for that matter.
In my blog post, http://chittendencommunications.com/content/six-insights-about-your-intranet-google-analytics, I point to six useful metrics that such a tracking application yields.
My six suggestions are just starting points. As Jurgen above points out, knowing the intranet’s goal is paramount for any decent analysis. Once the goal is established, gaining insight from a tracking program is limited only by imagination.
Brian Lamb September 25th, 2009 17:58
The ultimate metric is always task completion – what are the numbers of people who come to your intranet to do a top task that actually come away having succeeded The best place to begin your metrics trail is search. If you can get the most popular search terms spread out for say a year these point to your top tasks, once you know the top tasks you know what to measure.