The Northern Territory Government engaged True North Content to develop an intranet content strategy to guide the Department of Education and Training (DET) intranet redevelopment project. Our work included developing a new information architecture (IA) and a governance guide for creating, structuring and governing intranet content.
The challenge
DET faces unique challenges in connecting schools and corporate staff across a vast territory and providing equal access to resources in remote areas. The original DET intranet, eNet, was widely seen as clunky, outdated and hard to use. As a result, schools had developed their own workarounds using Teams and other platforms, which posed significant policy and governance risks.
In 2019, the DET policy team was tasked with migrating the policy and advisory library (PAL) out of eNet and onto eLearn, a teaching resources platform for schools. This was a temporary measure while the new intranet was developed as part of their Beyond SharePoint program. However, this meant that there was no single source of truth for corporate and school staff who needed to log in to multiple sites to access information.
DET needed a clear strategy to unite the platforms and make it easier for staff to access the information they needed. But stakeholders were fatigued by the long-running project, and were resistant to yet another project they perceived as just ‘talking about the intranet’.
Our approach
We began by diving deeply into our research phase to understand the different environments. We reviewed existing research and work completed as part of the Beyond SharePoint program, and ran a discovery workshop with key business areas.
We audited the eNet and eLearn sites as well as a sample of pages from their iCentre site, which housed ICT knowledge base articles and information. We conducted in-depth interviews with DET corporate staff, teachers, principals and school business managers from a range of schools and regions across the Territory. We also ran a user survey to capture as many perspectives as possible.
This helped us identify the different business needs of these two distinct groups and understand their content requirements and pain points. Our research revealed that staff distrusted the intranet and would rather ask a team member or use their own shortcuts to find the information they needed. School staff, in particular, expressed frustration at needing to navigate multiple sites to find information.
The result
We synthesised our research into key findings, recommendations and guiding principles. Working closely with DCDD, we drafted and tested a new IA and provided recommendations on consolidating and migrating content to its new home.
We defined governance standards and business rules for publishing content, including editorial guidelines aligned with the NTG web presence policy, standards and style guides. We also developed content models to support the content lifecycle, along with detailed user personas based on insights from our stakeholder interviews.
Our strategy and roadmap presented a clear, definitive path forward for the new DET intranet and a future vision as it moves into the platform build and set-up phase.
