Putting Lipstick On Your SharePoint Intranet

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig.

In the same way, you can try your best to make your SharePoint Intranet more attractive. You can try and teach it to behave by transforming it into a "social intranet. You can do a lot of superficial things to increase your Intranet Adoption rate...  but at the end of the day, if it was once a pig, it will always and forever still be a pig.

Not that I have anything against pigs.

As a former Veterinary surgeon, I know only to well that pigs are supremely intelligent; they are even very clean, if given the space a pig will designate specific areas for specific activities, one area for eating, one area for the poop and pee, and a separate area for sleeping. But you cannot expect a pig to be anything else other than a pig.

This is not an insult...but...

Your SharePoint Intranet is a pig. It is very smart, highly functional and it can grow very, very quickly. but if you want it to reach its full potential, then you are going to have to stop dressing it in heels and putting lipstick on it. Let her be a pig.

Getting Primal with Your SharePoint Intranet

When it comes to Intranet Adoption it's time to get primal and go back to your piggy roots and asking the hard questions like, "exactly, what is the core purpose of this thing?"

The overarching core purpose of any piece of enterprise software is to make work significantly better for the user. When this happens there is no problem with Intranet adoption.

In fact, low Intranet adoption is a symptom of an Intranet that doesn't solve big work problems for the User. When your employees are not adopting, when they are reticent, they are actually trying to tell you something about the technology... they are trying to tell you that the old way of doing things is still better.

Getting primal with your SharePoint Intranet is the first step in solving your adoption problem and greatly increasing the efficiency and productivity in your workplace.

3 Primal Questions to Ask:

1. Where are the sticking points/log jams in work productivity for each of your Users? (You will have to ask them)
2. What are 3 ways in which your SharePoint Intranet could make work significantly faster and simpler for each type of User you have?
3. Does your current Intranet address these problems and provide significant solutions? If not, why not?

Avoiding the Lipstick

There are a lot of vendors out there, who are promising to put lipstick on your pig. They promise to rebrand your Intranet, give you nifty social tools. and to really get your people talking via your Intranet. This lipstick should fool no one.

Identifying your work problems and creating an Intranet that will truly solve these problems is the process that you must go through if you are truly wanting to use SharePoint Intranet to grow your organization.

One organization that is doing a great job of addressing the deep issues with Intranets is Emgage. I would recommend you check them out and book a demo here.