Keep your intranet up-to-date with Dashboards

A common problem with intranet content is that it is often out of date or, just as importantly, it is perceived as being out of date by users. Keeping all that content up to date can be a challenge, especially if the intranet is low down on the list of responsibilities for content owners.

A good way to keep your intranet current and relevant is to focus on key information and brevity. Intranet dashboards are supportive of this approach as they display only top level information, usually in a graphical format that makes it quicker for both the audience to digest and the content owners to share.

In fact, dashboards can pull their data directly from Business Intelligence systems, reporting automatically on indicators such as sales figures or stock levels. Even if the dashboards are updated manually then this need involve no more than editing a few numbers in a text file once a month.

The important thing is that the dashboards are initially created so that they (a) support the displaying of all data which you would like to show, and (b) grab the audiences attention, allowing them to access the information they want quickly and easily.

To see some examples of dashboards you can read our dashboard overview, our case study, or take a look at this example from the UKs Financial times website.