Intranet Content Analysis and Site Construction

A business research team has collected over two hundred studies, presentations, and reports on healthy eating issues and lifestyle trends. The electronic documents are loosely organized into folders on a file server. Managing the folders is a low priority responsibility of one the researchers and many have not been thoroughly reviewed and filed sensibly. An internal initiative sparks global interest in the latest research on healthy lifestyles, and the research team is in dire need of posting the content to the company Intranet.

I was hired to analyze the content and build an Intranet site that would efficiently and effectively address the information seeking goals of the global research community.

• Identified key content with the lead business researcher and discussed the typical mindset of researchers who are looking for information
• Analyzed the content, extracted the key findings and wrote abstracts
• Sorted the content into groups based on the type and breadth of the research
• Produced images of the key charts and graphs from the research documents
• Defined the browsing structure and posted the documents, abstracts, and visuals using the content management tool
• Reviewed the pages with the lead researcher and the project team

The Intranet site was operational in less than a month and received extremely positive reviews from the research team. The site centralized the relevant research on health topics for the 100+ international business researchers, encouraged internal knowledge sharing and promoted business changes.

I learned the content management tool in a day. I also learned how woefully inadequate the indexing and searching capabilities of the tool were. This turned my focus away from explicitly indexing every document toward writing clear and concise descriptions, abstracts, and links on the pages.