How to evaluate content managementsystems for the intranet

What are the most important topics in an intranet architecture, what are the most important features for Content Managementsystems to be used in an Intranet?

I just sent out a Request for Proposal to a longlist of vendors and I am now about to prioritize all the defined requirements. What I came up with as a proposal for further discussion is

• basic technology first (if its supposed to be java it shouldnt be .net)
• compatibility, scalability, integration features (content, applications and users as well as import and export)
• support (slas, guarantees, personal skills and qualities, regional distance/availability)
• basic business requirements (multitenant, multilingual, if required)
• workflows, roles and permissions
• roadmap, strategy, partnering models with vendors
• licensing models, licensing costs
• other commercial issues
• additional business requirements

It may be a little strange that the commercial criteria are so low in the ranking. In my opinion, the licensing costs really hardly matter. Vendors will offer you discounts that they almost pay you for buying their system, they will always be cheaper than their competitor. Id they are not and there is really a difference – then you should be alarmed.
The real costs will come up with additional tools and integration efforts – thats why integration features are my number 2, and support is # 3. Support and the personal relationship determin, how fast your developers will work – this will depend on how good documentation and support are, but also on how much they like the system and its consultants.
Business requirements and workflows are # 4 and 5 because they are important, but you can still fix things that are not ok – as long as # 2 and 3 are granted.
The roadmap is nice to know – you should make sure that you and your partner are going in the same direction.
You will have to pay for it, yes. But once youve paid, its over. Thats whz licensing costs are only # 6. And if # 3, 4, 5 and 6 are ok, you will be happy to pay.

So dont worry too much about prices, dont look at the big players only, listen to your developers and do care about personal relationships on all levels. If you get along with developers, project managers and CEOs, the project will be smooth and great.

Identify Project Drivers

Online projects are still very often process-, technology- and it-driven. No wonder: everything is new and exciting, still, new technologies emerging at least every half year. Compared to this dynamic environment, the business perspective is boring: it’ still abou selling, publishing, informing – the targets remain the same they have always been for a brick and mortart company. Opposed to both these perspective, i like the approach you tend to incorporate when you deal a lot with design and usability-issues: don’t care about processes and business targets either, but just focus on the user experience:

• Tell the user a story, give him a reason to be on your pages.
• Imagine (or better research) what the users want to do in order to live this story.
• Make sure the story fits to your business targets.
• Design processes that satisfy your and your users’ needs.
• Design a system that supports these processes.

Sacrifying the user experience to the beauty of an architecture diagram or the simplicity of a process is a bad habit. Maybe it will make your system run smoothly and save some work for the 5 or 10 people who are maintaining it. But did you ever compare that to then pain of several dozens of business users or the frustration of several thousand end users?I like the user experience driven approach to projects, but be warned: it will make you look stupid in the beginning when you are starting your discussion with IT.

Design

I tried to present some designs for the new intranet in a project I’m currently working on to the boss of the communication department. I just wanted to get some feedback on colours, use of logos, the general look and feel and maybe some discussion on the top level menu.
Not even the first sentence was finished as we were in the middle of a discussion on content details, wether to put tables of content on the top or on the bottom of a page, on how to remodel the voluminous pieces of content that made up large parts of the intranet and on about which new interaction schemes should be designed and how that would influence the organisation.
As regarding the look and feel, she just made an ugly face at the beginning, but at the end of our discussion she said something like “Well, the longer, I look at it, the better I like it, somehow.”

We think we’re focused clear and precise when we go into a presentation. “I want to discuss our new designs with you, just to give you an overall impression of what it could feel like.” – But even artifical terms like design allow such a wide variety of understanding.
Two me, we need two things to cope with that:
1) More definitions, which means more artificial terms. Concerning design, that could be Information Design, Interaction Design, Identity Design, Graphic Design
2) Nobodx will listen while we are trying to explain that stuff. we should have explanations ready and we should be prepared to discuss it with everybody, but it is even more important that we are prepared to understnd who is talking to us about what, to categorie the inputs todeal with everything at it’s time, but to stay focused enough to get now the decisions we want now.
This could be something like agile presentation mode.

Communication and Organization

It is great that intranets are developing into something way bigger than “just” a communication media. They are supposed to be collaboration and cooperation platforms, interactive tools and an interface to legacy systems and business processes.
The last one makes a really big difference: this is were you get from talking to acting. That sounds as if communication was nothing (well, it’s my job, so dont get me wrong), but what I’m trying to tell is that usually communication sets the agenda and makes the decisions (things are determined a lot by the way they are told; think about new products, organizational changes, new managers) but in the case of representing business processes through the intranet, you learn a lot about the limited power of communication:

• you have to understand the processes
• you have to convince the process owners that they bother to explain the processes to you
• you have to represent the processes in a way that others can also understand them
• you have to create the communicative processes that surround the business processes; thats actually some kind of marketing activity
• you have to question yourself if all this is actually worth it or if the world would not be much simpler and clearer if business processes stay where they are and intranets are communication media.

To keep it short: I definitely think that it is way smarter to combine things and make them visible via one source. The intranet should be something like a trademark – brought to you by your Intranet. It’s the first and single access point, and it provides all the information you need. Maybe not in all available depths, but it tells you were to go.

Thinking about the big thing

The project has not been started yet, so there is plenty of time to set things upo in a decent way.

What’s the target: We want to create a groupwide intranet for a company in the banking industry that covers 9 countries (with 9 different languages), 55.000 employees and a lot of associate companies.

Why do we want to do this: Because the existing intranets are old and can’t keep pace with modern technology and requirements, because something needs to be done for image and effiency puposes and because we want to promote group- and multimedia content.

what’s the current situation: people use the intranet because they have to, they like the simple structure and the word-like appearance, nobody except the communications division is using any cms (it all happens in word-documents), usabillity and menu-issues are not the most sophisticated ones, but people are happy – or maybe they are just afraid of change…