Imagine all your users were retail customers

Actually, they are. And they expect you to manage your internal systems as if they are customers of every other retail site they visit. They may not be able to go to another competitor for the information that is on your intranet or provided by internal applications, but you can bet they wish they could if the availability or performance is not great. So what would you do if the internal systems were retail systems.

• You would monitor the end-user experience for health and performance
• You would communicate clearly and with advanced notice if there were planned maintenance periods or surprise outages
• You would make the look and feel of internal sites attractive and highly usable
• You would find ways to minimize the mean time to repair when there are issues through integrated monitoring and training on how to diagnose issues