Enterprise Intranet Strategy & Organizational Knowledge System RoadmapReframing an Intranet from a Website to a Knowledge and Collaboration System
How might we transform a fragmented, low-trust intranet into a shared organizational infrastructure that helps employees find information, collaborate effectively, and perform their work consistently across a complex public-sector organization?
EPA Victoria's intranet had evolved organically over time into a fragmented collection of content repositories, SharePoint sites, documents, and tools. Despite being central to daily operations, employees across offices and functions struggled to find information, collaborate efficiently, and complete work without resorting to informal workarounds.
Rather than treating the problem as a website redesign, I approached it as a systems and organizational design challenge. Using mixed-methods research, stakeholder engagement, and workflow analysis, I identified the structural factors that prevented the intranet from functioning as a trusted knowledge system and developed a roadmap for long-term transformation.
The Challenge
Leadership initially sought recommendations for improving the organization's intranet experience.
However, research revealed that usability issues were symptoms of a deeper problem:
Information ownership was unclear
Content governance was inconsistent
Knowledge was fragmented across multiple systems
Regional and remote employees lacked equitable access to information
Collaboration and task-support tools were disconnected from real work practices
The core challenge was not improving navigation or visual design.
It was creating an organizational system to support information sharing, knowledge management, collaboration, and operational consistency at scale.
EPA Victoria's intranet had evolved over many years through multiple organizational restructures, technology implementations, and policy changes.
What appeared to be an information access problem was actually a much deeper organizational challenge.
Employees included scientists, environmental specialists, legal professionals, compliance officers, policy advisors, and operational staff—each with their own specialized terminology, workflows, and ways of organizing information.
Compounding this complexity, successive organizational transformations had introduced new structures, naming conventions, acronyms, and content repositories without establishing a shared enterprise-wide information architecture.
As a result:
Information was difficult to find
Content ownership was unclear
Terminology varied between departments
Similar information existed under different names
Search results were inconsistent
Employees relied on personal knowledge, informal networks, and workarounds to complete tasks
The core challenge was not designing a better intranet.
It was creating a shared language, taxonomy, and organizational knowledge structure to support a highly specialized workforce operating across multiple disciplines.
Disclaimer: This image is a stock photo used to demonstrate the environment of an EPA Victoria employee working at the headquarters in Melbourne, Australia.
My Role
UX & Design Research Lead (Stamford Interactive - now PWC Australia)
I led the UX design, research, and strategy engagement, defining and executing the research program, facilitating stakeholder workshops, synthesizing findings, and developing the strategic roadmap and future-state recommendations.
I worked directly with executives, managers, operational staff, and regional teams to understand how information moved through the organization and how the intranet could better support work.
What I Did
Conducted Enterprise Information Architecture Research
Interviewed executives, managers, scientists, legal experts, field officers, and administrative staff
Mapped how different groups described similar information
Identified terminology conflicts, duplicate concepts, and competing mental models
Assessed how organizational restructures had impacted information organization
Diagnosed Organizational Knowledge Fragmentation
Mapped information silos across departments
Identified inconsistent naming conventions and taxonomy structures
Analyzed content ownership and governance gaps
Evaluated how organizational history influenced information access
Facilitated Shared Understanding
Led workshops to surface competing definitions and terminology
Built consensus around common organizational language
Established principles for enterprise information architecture
Created alignment between business functions with different professional vocabularies
Developed Future-State Knowledge Architecture
Defined enterprise taxonomy recommendations
Proposed governance structures for content ownership
Created navigation and classification frameworks
Produced a phased roadmap for implementation
Key Deliverables
Enterprise Information Architecture Assessment
Analysis of organizational language, taxonomy conflicts, and information fragmentation across the enterprise.
Taxonomy and Classification Framework
Recommendations for shared nomenclature, tagging structures, content hierarchy, and information governance.
Organizational Knowledge System Model
A systems view of how information, collaboration, and task support should function together.
Future-State Intranet Roadmap
A phased strategy for evolving the intranet into a trusted organizational knowledge platform.
Why This Work Matters
This project was ultimately about organizational alignment through information architecture.
Before an organization can improve collaboration, automate workflows, deploy AI assistants, or implement enterprise search, it must first establish a shared understanding of how knowledge is organized and described.
The most difficult challenge was not technical—it was creating a common language across specialists with different expertise, priorities, and historical ways of working.
The same capabilities required for this work are increasingly critical for organizations implementing AI today:
Knowledge Architecture
Taxonomy Design
Information Governance
Organizational Sense-Making
Systems Thinking
Cross-Functional Alignment
Change Readiness
Human-Centered Transformation
AI systems are only as effective as the information structures that support them.
This engagement demonstrates how organizational knowledge can be made visible, structured, and governable—creating the foundation for future digital and AI-enabled transformation.
Problem Context
EPA Victoria’s intranet had evolved organically over time into a fragmented, unreliable system that no longer supported how staff actually worked. Employees across roles—field officers, administrators, executives, and specialists—struggled to find accurate information, reuse prior work, collaborate effectively, or manage tasks without relying on informal workarounds such as spreadsheets, emails, and personal databases
Despite significant reliance on the intranet for daily work, staff had low trust in the system:
Information was difficult to find and often outdated
Content ownership and governance were unclear
Collaboration tools (e.g., SharePoint) were perceived as complex and poorly structured
Remote and regional staff lacked equitable access to information
Work tracking and visibility were largely manual and inconsistent
This resulted in:
duplicated effort and rework
increased operational risk
inconsistent application of policy and procedures
significant productivity loss
The core design question was therefore not visual redesign, but:
How can an intranet function as a trusted, task-oriented knowledge system that supports real work across a complex public-sector organization?
Research Approach
A mixed-methods, user-centered research program was conducted to understand both how the intranet was used and how work actually happened across the organization.
Qualitative Methods
Interviews with executive and senior management stakeholders
Contextual inquiries (site visits) across metro and regional offices
Focus groups with staff representing key functional personas
Persona-focused workshops to validate task patterns and needs
Stakeholder workshops using structured sense-making exercises (e.g., the “Cars” exercise) to surface shared mental models of current and future state
Quantitative Methods
Organization-wide intranet survey (109 respondents)
Business requirements survey (25 respondents)
Analysis of task frequency, information access patterns, and reported failure points
Review of documented operational risks related to information management (including external reports on data and document proliferation)
Together, these methods enabled triangulation between lived experience, reported behavior, and organizational risk indicators, establishing a rigorous mixed-methods foundation.
Key Insight
The most critical insight was that the intranet’s failure was structural, not cosmetic.
The system lacked:
a clear purpose
a shared definition of success
governance for content and ownership
alignment to real user tasks
As a result, the intranet attempted to be “everything to everyone” and became functionally unusable for most users.
This reframed the problem:
An intranet is not a website—it is organizational infrastructure.
Without treating information, collaboration, and task support as interdependent system components, no amount of interface improvement would succeed.
Design Artifacts
Rather than proposing a single redesign, the work produced a roadmap as a design artifact—a structured, phased representation of how the intranet should evolve over time in response to user needs, policy constraints, and organizational change.
Artifact 1: Task-Oriented Intranet Vision
A new mission was defined for the intranet as a single source of truth that:
enables staff to communicate and collaborate effectively
provides access to accurate information at the point of need
supports real work tasks rather than content browsing
Artifact 2: Personas & Task Models
Nine personas were developed representing both generic and role-specific users (e.g., new starters, field officers, executives, researchers, administrators). Each persona was grounded in real task journeys that highlighted breakdowns, workarounds, and risk points
These personas functioned as analytic instruments, not marketing profiles—used to reason about task design, access needs, and system priorities.
Artifact 3: Phased Intranet Roadmap
A multi-phase roadmap was designed to:
deliver immediate “quick wins” (content strategy, IA improvements)
establish governance and standards early
progressively introduce collaboration, analytics, and personalization
remain adaptable to policy and legislative change
The roadmap explicitly balanced user value, organizational readiness, and implementation feasibility.
Artifact 4: Shared Information Architecture as a Common Language
The redefined Information Architecture (IA) functioned not only as a navigation structure but also as a shared conceptual model for how the organization understood, governed, and used information.
The IA was the most challenging and impactful deliverable of the engagement. It took the form of a full-scale, spatially mapped model—so large that it covered all four walls of my workspace during synthesis. This physical scale was intentional: it allowed competing perspectives, content domains, and workflows to be seen simultaneously, revealing duplication, gaps, and misalignment that were invisible in siloed documentation.
When presented to the client, the IA was cited as the moment when the organization finally had a shared language for a centralized source of truth.
Resulting IA Characteristics
The resulting IA:
Organized information around work and intent, not organizational hierarchy
Explicitly distinguished between:
authoritative content
collaborative spaces
task-supporting resources
Embedded content ownership and governance directly into the structure
Reduced duplication by clarifying where information should live
Provided a stable foundation for future search, analytics, and personalization
Rather than optimizing for navigation alone, the IA functioned as infrastructure for shared understanding.
Disclaimer: This image is a stock photo used to demonstrate the metaphor of a small town in Australia.
How the IA Was Created (Methodological Rigor)
Cross-Functional IA Workshop Using a “Small Town” Metaphor
To break entrenched silos and policy-driven thinking, I facilitated a cross-functional workshop with subject-matter experts, using the metaphor of a small town to reason about shared digital spaces.
Participants were asked to collaboratively answer questions such as:
What functions belong in shared civic spaces versus specialized buildings?
Where do people naturally go when they don’t know where to start?
What spaces require governance, and which thrive on contribution?
What happens when information “lives” in the wrong part of town?
This metaphor allowed stakeholders to reason about:
public vs restricted information
official guidance vs working knowledge
ownership and stewardship
pathways between tasks, people, and information
Crucially, it shifted the conversation away from pages and folders toward purpose, behavior, and trust.
Evaluation & Validation
Evaluation occurred through:
stakeholder validation workshops
cross-role review of personas and task flows
alignment checks against business drivers and risk indicators
executive sign-off on roadmap priorities
Importantly, the roadmap itself was treated as a living evaluative artifact, designed to be revisited and adjusted as organizational conditions evolved
Design Science Contribution
This case demonstrates several transferable design science contributions:
Intranets as Socio-Technical Systems
Effective intranets must be designed as infrastructure supporting tasks, governance, and trust—not as content repositories.Roadmaps as Knowledge Artifacts
A roadmap can function as a design artifact that encodes theory, user insight, and organizational constraints.Personas as Analytical Tools
When grounded in task analysis, personas enable system-level reasoning rather than surface-level empathy.Design Under Policy Constraint
Public-sector systems require adaptability to legislative and political change; design must explicitly accommodate this reality.
What This Work Enabled
The roadmap provided EPA with:
a shared vision and vocabulary for intranet improvement
a structured path from fragmentation to coherence
a foundation for governance, analytics, and future capability building
reduced operational risk associated with unmanaged information
Reflection
This project reinforced a principle that continues to shape my work:
Design impact in complex organizations comes from shaping systems, not just interfaces.
By grounding design decisions in mixed-methods research and encoding them into durable artifacts, this work helped reposition the intranet as a strategic asset rather than a neglected tool
