Mark Morrell is an intranet pioneer who combines his experience of managing intranets and strategic thinking to help organisations improve the value of their intranets. Today we’re sharing Mark’s 10 questions to ask yourself to ensure that you are applying ‘smart’ standards to your intranet. A big thanks goes out to Mark for sharing his expert advice on achieving intranet success.

I have reviewed many intranets and have been amazed at the variety of publishing standards and how they are enforced. These vary from no publishing standards through to everything being locked down depending on the importance of complying with standards. More importantly, it is the amount of time, effort, and money that is used to enforce people to comply with the standards when they publish information.

I sometimes think organizations lose the plot and forget to look at the costs being spent on the benefit being gained.

Your intranet needs standards to make sure your organization complies with business, user, regulatory, and legal requirements in any country it operates in. The best approach is to have ‘smart’ standards that need the minimum time, effort, and cost while achieving the maximum effectiveness and benefits. How many of these questions can you answer “yes” to?

1. Do you train your publishers on what your intranet standards?
2. Do you also train your publishers on why your intranet has these standards?
3. Do you educate and support your publishers with guidance to understand more about your standards?
4. Do you embed any of your standards in the publishing templates e.g. branding, navigation menu?
5. Do publishers need to comply with your standards before their content is published e.g. images need to have alternative texts before they can be used?
6. Do you review content for compliance?
7. Do you remind your publishers if their content is non-compliant?
8. Do you remove content if no action by your publishers to comply?
9. Do you measure how compliant your intranet is?
10. Have you measured it more than once?

If you answered “yes” to all these questions then award yourself a gold medal!

If you answered “no” to any of these questions perhaps you’d like to read more of Mark’s blog, Intranet Pioneer. You can also gain more insight from Mark on Twitter.

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