Intranets2013 – Cleaning up your phone list

'Intranets Unite' sticker developed by StepTwo Designs for Intranets2013

This time last week I was in Sydney for Intranets2013. In addition to being a delegate I was fortunate to be invited to present about work we have been doing recently to clean up our intranet phone list.

I think the employee phone list is a critical productivity and connectivity resource for any organisation. For us, 97% of staff access our intranet to use the staff directory and our Customer Information Centre relies on up-to-date profiles to answer queries from the public. Up until we started this project our intranet phone list, active directory (outlook) and our HR system were not connected in anyway. By the end of the first stage of the project we were able to get 65% of data cleansed and complete and also achieve a manual “syncronisation” between those critical data sources. The critical piece in this is the cleansing itself, for which you may need staff involvement depending on the extent of the data integrity issues but you also need a really dedicated analyst to sift through that data, picking out the errors and where possible fixing dodgy data.

Have a flick through the Prezi which I pulled together for Intranets2013 for some highlights of our process. Huge props to the lovely Georgie Cunningham who was project coordinator during this piece of work and thanks James Robertson and the StepTwo crew for having me as a guest of the conference. Such a well organised and community minded event, a pleasure to be involved.

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For those of you who didn’t want to click through the Prezi, here is my advice for those embarking on some clean-up:

Have an agreed plan and scope
Stakeholder engagement is key
Get roles and responsibilities clear
Have commitment from IT
Plan time for testing and re-work
Resource outside of business as usual
Budget for technology improvements

If you are going through the exercise of cleaning up your phone list and want to chat with someone who has been through it feel free to get in touch with me.

Here are some links to resources from StepTwo Designs which I used before embarking on our clean up:

I also posted about the conference and post-conference workshop if you want to get a summary:

If you have any great tips, links or questions please feel free to comment below.