Patrick C. Walsh: Lean Intranet as a Way to Value-Orientation [Intranet Summit]

An Intranet Zoo offers virtually zero benefit

• In a survey „distributing information “ was considered the primary perceived role of an intranet
• Senior managers think of an uncontrolled, unmanaged, badly organized out-of-date environment
• obsolete content that is visible to the user
• duplicated content – the wheel being re-invented again and again
• poor and irrelevant content
• broken links and typographical errors
• complex and unusable navigational strutures
• too much content

• One size fits all
• Everyone can edit and structure content
• Intranets will remove information silos
• Users can find stuff by themselves

Everybody continues to put stuff into their Intranet and it gehts shapeless (like spaghetti)

Let’s redesign!

If you keep doing the same things you will keep getting the same results.

Ford ⇒ Toyota

Five Lean Principles

1. identify what creates value from the customer’s point of view
2. prioritise support for the activities that create value within your organisation
3. remove barries (i.e. between your users and the content they need to use)
4. only give the customer what they want when they need it
5. Strive by perfection by constantly removing waste

What are intranet ‚wastes‘

• Content
• Search (optimize it,)
• Navigation
• Inconsistencies
• defects (i.e. grammar)
• Not providing a clear vision of what your intranet is for

• First step is to delete all obsolete, poor and irrelevant content
• You need to know what content is really important to your users ⇒ user research

We can start building the Lean Intranet

⇒ Lean | Unseen

• Put the content 80 or 90 % of your users need most instantly in the lean part
• Lean part: High value high usage content approx 20 %
• It will take, it’s like a long journey. It’s not a big sudden shift over night

• Internal information
• External information
• Knowledge (have a look at James Robertson)

And every part is overlapping with an important part overlapping all other parts: Innovation through information synergy

• Find information easy and fast: People will be content and satisfied
• Simple tools
• Managers themselves need information

information professionals

• assessing and minimising content
• leveraging knowledge
• removing barriers
• customer focused approach