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Sandy Keilloh, head of Knowledge Management at T-Mobile, explained to delegates at an IoIC conference how its intranet has enhanced the company's business communications. Sandy Keilloh, head of Knowledge Management at T-Mobile, explained to delegates at an ioIC conference how its intranet has enhanced the company's business communications. Steve Nichols (steve@infotechcomms.co.uk) of InfoTech Communications reports: Sandy's first piece of advice was to avoid consultants. "You don't need a consultant to find out what stuff you should put on your intranet - you can do that yourself," he said. He added that management will have a different view of what employees want, but an intranet should support both a "top down" and "bottom up" approach. "Intranets don't always have to be inward facing and in today's environment must be more than corporate news," he said. "The traditional mantra of 'content, content, content' still applies, but authors must focus tightly on interest, usability and value. "It's not just about content, it's more about being interesting, usable and adding value to the business. You also need a long-term strategy to deliver what the business needs to know, long-term," he said. A self-confessed fan of the de-centralised approach to intranet management, Sandy added: "It doesn't have to be a leviathan from the beginning. Start small - it's better to have 200 pages of great content than 100,000 pages of verbiage. Don't try and leap tall buildings in a single bound." Sandy warned against buying in a complex, expensive content management system (CMS). "In my experience, you become locked into these proprietary systems and the wrong decision can be very expensive," he said. He also advised setting up a simple style guide covering basic design and editorial principles and auditing team's pages. "With more than 200,000 pages of content, we don't check every page but if someone is breaking our guidelines we do remove their pages," he said. T-Mobile's approach - involving users via mandatory interactive tasks like time sheets - has contributed to great results currently running at a 98 per-cent weekly hit rate. That is, 98pc of employees access the intranet at least once a week. This is effectively supported by a de-centralised approach that uses a broad base ownership to self regulate. Said Sandy: "By adopting this approach, the owners of the site must remember to keep senior managers happy - something that is easily done through pages or sites that focus on their particular idiosyncrasies. This, combined with tangible evidence of the impact - and remember the medium is till growing fast so the criteria will continue to change - will help ensure you keep the board onside." Sandy also warned against password-protecting sections of the intranet. "If it secured and not shared, then it shouldn't be on the intranet," he concluded.
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