The goal of an intranet site is to centralize knowledge within an organization and let employees find the information they need quickly. Traditional intranets tend to be organized by department. Doing this may seem like a good idea to HR or management, the people often tasked with organizing the intranet. Here are some reasons to organize your intranet around tasks and projects - not the organizational chart.

Encourage Cross-Departmental Collaboration, Discourage Silos

Intranets are used by different companies for different purposes. The two most common are information dissemination and collaboration. The former is how and why most intranets were started 5-10 years ago. If you're keeping with the times, your intranet has transformed into a considerably more collaborative tool. Especially if you're using a wiki-based intranet, collaboration is a central feature.

Organizing intranet content by department says something loud and clear: "You belong in this section." That may not be the intent, but employees will naturally feel like snoops clicking through another department's section on the intranet. If that's not your intent, be sure to avoid departmental organization.

People Only Know the Structure of their Own Department

The biggest reason departmentally organized intranets fail is that employees only know the organization details of their own department. Sure, everyone knows that Legal is the department to go to for contracts. But from there, it may be less clear.

By keeping things task-based and focused on projects, you can let people focus on the task at hand rather than trying to remember whether Patent, Trademark and Copyright Law needs to be involved in website domain purchasing.

Analytics & Usability: What is the person who is looking for this page trying to do?

One of the best ways to tease out task based organization for your intranet is to look at the web analytics. Take the top pages 25 or 50 pages in terms of traffic and ask, for each: What is somebody who is looking for this page trying to do? You'll likely start to see a pattern, and a task-based organizational structure will start to emerge.

One risk of this method is that you'll end up with a structure that's too flat. Be sure to group tasks with larger tasks. Instead of putting "Buying a website domain" and "Purchasing web hosting" into "IT", but it into "Web Property Setup & Procurement". Depending on your business, that activity is likely part of some larger process that occurs with some regularity.