Public Sector Intranets

Given the growing economic challenges and pressures on public spending, it is now apparent that the government will need to increase efficiency measures significantly as well as make increasing cuts. A well-designed and utilized intranet can help the public sector to cut costs and streamline everyday processes. It can also strengthen internal communications, provide an environment for collaboration and facilitate knowledge sharing. But to achieve this, your intranet needs to be an evolving resource that's easy to use, current, and matches the needs of the whole organisation. Therefore, it is essential that you establish best practice when developing your intranet to ensure it remains sustainable, user-friendly and relevant in the long-term. Public Sector Intranets is a unique guide to the particular challenges faced by those who develop, implement and manage intranet sites for public sector organisations. Based on the real-life experiences of the contributors, the report offers practical advice on topics such as securing buy-in and raising awareness at all levels of the organisation, improving accessibility and usability, use of web 2.0 tools and ensuring relevance with a thorough and effective user-consultation process.
Subjects covered include: *Ensuring staff at all levels of your organisation are engaged, interested and, most importantly, make good use of the intranet; *Gathering user requirements and understanding how your staff use the intranet; *Access and usability: *30 tips and suggestions to help your organisation optimise intranet accessibility and usability; *Practical advice on methods for testing the ease of access and use of your intranet; *Accessibility faux pas; *Analysis of old and new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines; *How your organisation can improve usability on a tight budget; *Methods for achieving user-centred design. Focus groups, traditional research, workplace observations and usability labs; *Creating a usability report. Comparing your intranet before and after to support the business case; *Information architecture. Best practice for structuring your intranet to avoid the architecture becoming invalid during organisational restructuring; *The pros and cons of personalisation and customisation; *Deploying web 2.0 technologies to best effect on your organisation's intranet and how intranet managers can overcome reluctance to embrace new technologies; *Overcoming the challenges of migrating content from a legacy intranet to a new site.
Embedding an effective and thorough process of review, update and validation to ensure valuable content and tools are not lost in the transfer, while out-of-date and redundant information and applications are not transferred; and, *How your intranet can support and drive internal change. Using the intranet to influence staff behaviour. Public Sector Intranets incorporates valuable new case studies and contributions from public sector organisations including: North Yorkshire County Council; New South Wales Department of Primary Industries; West Berkshire Council; Child Support Agency (Australia); Central Office of Information; Transport for London; and The Irish Health Service Executive.