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Intranet Information Architecture Best Practice Analysis
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| bet | 32/39 | | Sana | 01.04.2017 | | Hajmi | 240.5 Kb. | | #2750 |
Visible and easy to find. Most killer apps are access from their intranet’s homepage.
Mission-critical content at employees’ fingertips. The biggest factor driving a killer app’s popularity is its ability to give employees critical information with just a few easy mouse clicks or keyboard strokes.
Employee directories. By far, the most common killer app is an employee directory and directory search. Employee directories are crucial for bringing co-workers together, particularly at the point of need.
Building community. Some killer apps (e.g. company news, forums, and classified boards) directly develop an organisation’s internal community.
Replacing email. Intranet killer apps prove to be a more reliable, up-to-date, and faster method of disseminating information than emails or physical distribution.
Creating an element of fun. Some killer apps introduce an element of fun. For example, using a tongue-in-cheek tone, an amusing name for the employee directory (the City of Casey has named its award-winning intranet “Boris”), uploading photographs, and quick polls to test employee’s knowledge of a particular company area. Although small, they spice up an intranet, thereby increasing employee interest and enjoyment in using the intranet. It is important to note that fundamentally a killer app needs to be useful and helpful for staff. Creating an element of fun should not be reason itself for implementing a particular killer app.
Content contributions. Many killer apps allow employees and administrators to create and contribute content. By giving people tools to create and manage content, people have a greater sense of ownership and accountability over that content.
Integrating several information sources into one place. The success of some killer apps is due to their function of bringing several information sources into one interface.
An example of the use of “killer apps” that have led to intranets winning awards are, a “Partner Dashboard” tool as part of the Fuller Landau intranet which was developed to enhance their internal time and billing system which encapsulates all the financial information kept for each client (billable hours, etc).47 This innovation turned the intranet into a valuable business tool which encouraged the staff to visit every day.
Another example is the “Project Finder” for the Urbis Australia intranet. The Project Finder provides a rich mechanism for uncovering past projects, through the use of faceted search, and rich linking between resources. Project Finder was developed with the aims of providing an extremely flexible and easy way for staff to access, explore and apply Urbis’ collective work history, make it easy to apply the identified relevant work history to business development activities to help in winning more work and to leverage existing systems, data and capabilities.48 This is an example of both providing mission critical content and integrating several information sources in one place.
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