Intranets and Employee Portals: Making Internal Information Findable
Key takeaway
An intranet succeeds when it's the fastest way to do something — book leave, find a policy, look up a colleague — not when it's a well-organised library. Give every page an owner and a review date, because out-of-date internal content is the reason people stop trusting it.
Intranets have a poor reputation earned honestly: launched with enthusiasm, filled with documents, and abandoned once the content ages and search stops finding anything useful.
Build around tasks, not departments
- Organise by what people need to do — book time off, claim expenses, find a policy, order equipment, find a person — not by the organisational chart.
- Put the ten most common tasks on the front page and measure whether they're used.
- Link directly into the systems that perform them. A page describing how to submit expenses is worse than a link to the expenses system.
- Make the staff directory excellent: photographs, role, team, location, and contact details. It's consistently the most used feature and the one most often neglected.
Search is the make-or-break feature
- People search rather than browse. If search is poor, no amount of navigation design rescues it.
- Index document contents, not just titles — most internal knowledge is inside attachments.
- Tolerate the internal vocabulary: acronyms, old system names, and the words people actually use.
- Promote authoritative results for common queries — one definitive answer beats eleven similar documents.
- Review search logs monthly. Failed searches tell you precisely what's missing or misnamed.
Content ownership prevents decay
- Every page has a named owner and a review date, shown on the page.
- Content past its review date is flagged to the owner and eventually unpublished, not left to mislead.
- One current version of each policy, with the history available but clearly historical.
- Let teams publish their own content within a structure, rather than routing everything through one bottleneck.
Measure it like a product
Track task completion for the top tasks, search success rate, and how many people return weekly. Then ask the service desk which questions they still answer repeatedly — each one is a content or findability gap. An intranet that reduces routine internal questions is paying for itself; one that's merely well organised is a filing cabinet with a login.