An intranet should, from my perspective, serve the people looking for general information as well as the ones who need specific information to solve an urgent task this very minute.
During the last few weeks I’ve been participating in many and interesting meetings which all have raised the question of how to measure success when it comes to finding content and people on your intranet. When working with enterprise search you often use the time you save as an important parameter. “If the users can find what they are looking for, then their everyday work will be more effective. Hereby we can save the user time and the company money”. This is an obvious truth, but I believe that there is more to consider.

If you use your intranet as a way for your employees not only to find information, but also share and collaborate it’s just as important that you find information that is related to you query (that you sometimes didn’t even know existed!), that makes you gain deeper knowledge and hence become more innovative. How do you measure success in those areas? There is a need for discussing supplementary new ways to measure Key Performance Indicators, perhaps by using more qualitative tools and focusing on user experience (of information retrieval, content quality and experienced value) over time.

What is your opinion? Do these things need to be measured in “hard facts” or can we find other ways to measure the value we deliver to our users?