Know your business inside out

When company regulations and rules were printed and bound in thick books, the personnel department (as it then was) always suspected that nobody was reading them. Now all this information is on the intranet, the human resources department (as it now is) can see exactly who’s reading what and when. They rarely bother to look, though.

While the marketing department might be adept at analysing traffic on the website, few companies apply the same web analytics technology to the intranet. It’s a missed opportunity.

By analysing what people are looking for on the intranet, companies can refine the navigation and personalise the site so that each department can quickly find what it needs most often. Companies can find out if staff are trudging through the site without finding what they want, only to resort to the contacts list to ask someone to answer their question. Those contacted could be invited to contribute their most frequently asked questions to the intranet, so they are spared constant interruptions and everyone else can find the information they need more quickly.

Where forums are provided to share information, those who contribute most can be identified and made formal champions for internal communications. They could help to convert lurkers into active contributors, and help to circulate news offline too.

By linking the internet and intranet, companies can identify the most popular webpages for employees, by department. That information can be used to provide quick links to top sites, or even to bring news feeds into the intranet to stop duplicated downloads wasting bandwidth.

The intranet also provides a safe environment for testing features and content destined for the public website. Staff will be less phased by company jargon than the general public, but can otherwise help to highlight any problems on the site before it’s exposed to external scrutiny. Intranets tend to control access by user ID and password, which means all the data held about an individual can be tied to their behaviour in the browser. Companies can see whether features on their website are harder for older people to access, or whether response varies by gender or education.

Another advantage is the ability to experiment with profiling and behavioural targeting. Because it’s an intranet, you have access to a wider variety of different data sources, all of which you own.

Since everyone can be personally identified, it’s also possible to use analytics to police use of the internet during work time. While companies are well within their rights to exploit any information available to them, they need to communicate the personalisation benefits that analysis can provide to staff. The intranet will be boycotted if staff worry that Big Brother is counting every click.