This is the story of a very profitable, successful, large enterprise that spent over $2 million on their intranet. When the intranet launched, it crashed in seconds. It has never gone live again (more than a year later).
Leaving an intranet design to the whim of a designer, a creative agency or any individual not working from a sound blueprint represents poor judgment, management, and is a recipe for disaster.
Sound intranet design follows a process that incorporates:
1- Business requirements (as expressed by management) 2- User requirements (as expressed by employees) 3- Strategic & functional planning 4- Governance 5- Best practices & usability
The process for arriving at the stage where a designer applies color and images to a design concept is one that should be taken seriously, and if done properly, may take a number of weeks. This process is the underlying foundation of a successful intranet design, one that is examined and outlined in the webinar Intranet Design – A Business Approach to a Winning Design.
Note: not all 25 intranets profiled during this webinar, but not are available for distribution.
The story of the failed intranet, and the squandering of more than $2 million and years of worker hours, is ultimately a story about a failure in planning. Without sound requirements that drive a thorough intranet blueprint, culminating in the intranet design, your intranet risks failure.
(LAS VEGAS) Lest you be tingling with excitement about the potential enhancements to your less than spectacular content management system, there are two realities for SharePoint 2010: what is promised, and what is hoped for.
Those working with MOSS 2007 can be forgiven for the vacuous deflating sound from their proverbial balloons – those familiar with 2007 promises that don’t materialize as promised (e.g. People Search); others attending the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas can be forgiven for their rapid inhalation of hot air as there is great reason to be optimistic, even excited.
Nonetheless, I’ve been both impressed and underwhelmed with what I’ve seen, but more time is needed for Microsoft to complete the beta testing and final refinements before 2010 ships to customers in the spring of 2010. When I asked SharePoint chief Tom Rizzo to explain how he thought the content management functionality compared with other market leaders, Rizzo – speaking as a proud, if not slightly defensive father – instead turned the question back on me: “I challenge all of the other vendors to offer as comprehensive a platform as SharePoint – nothing comes close.” Touché!
Here are five of the biggest impact, promised improvements to enterprise content management (ECM) that I’ve seen with my own two eyes, and even used (albeit with mixed success as the ‘lab’ demos are not all working as promised, and a demo is in fact just a demo):
1-Publishing platform – the entire publishing platform is, in essence, a wiki. You can choose to lock down wiki or public authoring rights, extend them to some, or extend them to all. However, it is possible to create sites as wikis. The wikis come with complete version control, history and permissions, and the rich editor or “ribbon” functionality (as seen in Word 200).
2-Web content management (WCM) – communications professionals rejoice: publishing news and other static content just got a lot easier. The new publishing includes the new “ribbon” user tool that opens when you click on a page or a document, or you simply hit the edit button at the top of a page. Instead of opening a content ‘template’ the new publishing features in-context editing: click on whatever piece of content you want to “edit”, and edit right there on the page (just as you would a wiki). New image tools allow for better control and manipulation of photos, and you no longer have to make the extra step of uploading a photo to a document library before you input it into the page – you can now pull images right from your hard drive, or a website URL.
3-Records management (RM) – Microsoft has invested a lot of money in improving RM in 2010. Among the many features that have impressed, users or administrators (or someone else that has permission to do so) are able to lock down a document in a document library, as a record. And with a right click, can send that document to a Record Center with confirmation. Additional Life Cycle controls have been added.
4-Digital asset management (DAM) – yes, SP 2010 actually includes DAM – you no longer have to use a third-party option to professionally manage images, video and other multimedia.
5-Taxonomy & meta data – perhaps the single, most impressive upgrade or enhancement to SharePoint is the addition of true taxonomy and meta datacontrols. All content now comes with a Managed Meta Data Service Term set that can be inherited from the global taxonomy (site collection), can be built upon or controlled by an administrator, or open to all users (or a combination). In other words, when content is created, be it a page, document, wiki, meta data can be added on the spot, as determined by the publisher or limited to a pre-determined set or tree of terms that is locked down. End readers and users can ‘tag’ the content as well with term tags, ratings (1-5 starts) and “I like it.” What is most encouraging about the use of meta data is that it can be “forced” or a “mandatory field” for all content (we all know that most organizations have options to input meta tags on content, but most content authors ignore it if given the choice).
Other taxonomy features:
·Term ‘nesting” or “threading”(think of the tree with parent & children categories)
·“Fill-in” choices as an option in locked-down taxonomies
·Different taxonomies at different levels: site collections, sites, libraries, etc.
·Managed meta data service can be consumed by multiple farms
·Multilingual taxonomy support (taxonomies using multiple languages)
·Taxonomy workflow (invite specific people to contribute or review the taxonomy)
·View and filter documents by term:
oGeography
oProduct Category
oVertical Industry
oContent Type
oDeal Size
oFolders
oEtc.
While not all of these promised improvements were working in the hands-on labs in my time spent using MOSS 2010, this is in-fact only the beta version (in fact, one of the MS officials helping me through the hands-on labs told me that some of the tutorials are in fact still alpha versions. In fact, the first time I used the new wiki I was convinced it was the 2007 version as I could see not a single improvement to it). There is still some 6 or 7 months still to pass before Microsoft has to work out all the bugs, kinks, and refinements (planned release to existing MOSS 2007 customers is at the end of April, though I would not expect something for installation much before the summer; new customers will have to wait even longer).
Finally, it’s worth noting that MOSS is a massively complex, and powerful system. It’s to be expected that some of the promised functionality may not work for some time, or without serious additional development and customization. In fact, any organization considering an upgrade may do well to wait until after the first service pack, or simply trial the new SharePoint Online which will have close to feature parity with the installed, on premises version.
(LAS VEGAS, NV) If there was one, overarching message delivered by CEO Steve Ballmer in his keynote unveiling Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (at the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas): SharePoint is no longer just an intranet solution, it’s been architected for all forms of web scenarios.
“SharePoint is one of my favorite Microsoft products…. It’s true,” says Ballmer. “SharePoint, in my estimation, is kind of magical.I don’t think there’s anything like it in the market. It has become a platform for a whole big set of scenarios that were served by niche (products).”
New scenarios include all of the typical intranet scenarios, but all the Internet scenarios they can attack. To drive the point home, Ballmer cited many companies already using MOSS 2007 for their public website including:
·Kraft Foods (consolidated 200 websites to a single platform saving $2 million per year)
·Volvo (36 languages, 70 countries)
·Pfizer
·Library of Congress
·Hawaiian Airlines
·Kroger
·Conservation International
However, it remains to be seen whether the improvements to MOSS’s web content management will be sufficient to quell the traditional content publishing and management concerns of marketing and communications managers who operate external websites. The new UI for web content management is a marked improvement – in-context editing deploying the ‘ribbon’ UI introduced in Office 2007.
Ballmer announced that MOSS 2010 will public beta test this November (no specific date was delivered). The MS chief also spent a lot of time talking about “the cloud” and was even so bold as to state that “SharePoint is in the center of the cloud.”
“It’s all in the cloud–we certainly agree with that,” said Ballmer, who stressed that SharePoint Online has more than 1 million online users (and 7,000 partners). “SharePoint is more capable, more extensible, more Internet & cloud focused. It’s an amazing product.”
NEW FEATURES / TOOLS:
·“Ribbon” interface (in-context editing)
·"Visual web parts” (“no more hard-coding of web parts”)
·Supports development / design on Vista & Windows 7
·Access services (publish Access dbases through SP)
·New sandboxed solutions
·Integrated rich media & Silverlight
·Improved Visual Studio & SQL
·Upgrades from 2007 will include a complete migration of an existing home page design / UI to 2010
·Improved social computing (blogs, wikis, tagging, ratings, etc)
·Improved search algorithms and FAST Search integration
·New site scenarios for:
oPricing analysis
oHiring processes
oCitizen management (citizen portals)
oProject tracking
oSales reporting
oConference planning
oDelivery scheduling
oCompliance review sites
SOCIAL COMPUTING
“We needed to facilitate this next generation of social computing,” stated Ballmer, though not convincingly, when asked about the improvements on social media – a notorious weakness of the MOSS 2007 platform. “We’ve done this with My Sites, mashing-up, etc. I think we’ve moved towards 3.0.”
Improvements to the highly criticized social computing of MOSS include:
Better blogs, wikis, calendars
Co-authoring
Content tagging
Tag clouds
Ratings
Bookmarks
MySites “Smart Profiles” and feeds
Browse colleagues and experts
“Share This Site.”
“There isn’t an enterprise on the planet that doesn’t want to embrace social computing, but they worry about how to do it,” explained Ballmer. “If we can show a path to CEOs and CIOs that we can let people interact with each other the way they want to (and still protect privacy and security) then they will embrace social computing.”
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Improvements to ECM include:
·Document management: The ceiling limit on a document library moves to 10 million, and within a site collection, to hundreds of millions of documents; no longer will you have to right click to bring up the actions / options of a document, the ribbon hosts all of the options / actions the user needs
·Taxonomy management: you will be able to have consistent content types taxonomy across server farms (applied at the document level)
·Pictures: photos no longer have to be in an SP library, but can be uploaded from your hard drive
·The addition of true Digital Asset Management
GOVERNANCE
Perhaps the biggest criticism or flaw of SharePoint has been the issue of governance, which Microsoft has only addressed half-heartedly, as reflected in Tom Rizzo’s comments: “There’s a lot we’re doing on governance, but its only 20% software, and 80% process,” says Rizzo, Senior Director, SharePoint. “We’ve invested a lot in best practices, centers of excellence. We’ll continue to invest, but I think we’re still need near the beginning, than the end.” In other words, governance is more the client’s responsibility than Microsoft’s.
SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE STATISTICS:
·7.5 miles of network cable
·7,400 participants (up from 3,800) – 94% growth
·297 world class speakers
·70 countries
·165 sponsors
·300+ hours
·240 sessions
·45+ hours of hands-on labas
·18 customer sessions (Delloite)
·2 SharePoint marriages
·Biggest Beach Party ever by Mandalay with Huey Lewis & The News
As is the
case with most websites or intranets it is simply impossible to achieve any
long-lasting success without a clearly defined ownership and management
structure. Intranet governance provides clarity and rules: namely the titles,
roles and responsibilities of its owners, managers, stakeholders and
contributors. However, at the heart of a successful model, is a powerful
executive with purse strings, supported by a solid intranet team.
Here are
some of the most frequently asked questions regarding governance and a
successful intranet, culled from the Q&A of my webinar on Intranet
Governance (the highest attended webinar to date) last month:
Q- How do you define what a great intranet is?
A – A great intranet:
operates from a thorough, well defined plan;
is managed by a rigorous governance model supported by a powerful
senior executive and a solid management team;
has a reasonable budget for both technical and content development;
features solid, purposeful content and tools that actively support
the day-to-day work of employees; and
delivers a solid return on investment in the form of cost savings /
cost avoidance and increased sales.
Q - What is the governance model that fits companies
who have made the move to social media on their intranet?
A – Governance depends on the culture, company and the
management and stakeholders involved. Social media MUST have governance though it
should fall under the central intranet governance unless the social media tools
are purely separate and owned separately from the intranet / portal home.
A successful social media governance model requires:
A defined owner with clout
Defined roles & responsibilities for all
Policies (rules) for contributing content
Terms of use
Q - Can you talk to setting up a steering committee in
more detail, especially when all stakeholders feel that it is their intranet?
A – Follow a proper intranet
assessment to ensure that all key intranet stakeholders (managers and
executives with a full, partial or perceived ownership stake in the intranet or
its major sections and tools) have a formal opportunity to provide input and to
itemize their key requirements. From assessment you move into intranet
planning that actively engages these key stakeholders and culminates in the
development of one of four key intranet governance models that all (or at least
most) agree to adopt for their own.
They key is building consensus. If the stakeholder
environment is particularly fractured and not given to teamwork, or have
competing priorities, then a third-party, non-partisan can help facilitate the
process and break down the political barriers.
Q - Is there a template for comprehensive Governance
Planning?
A - We do not have a free template because that is
actually a service that we provide, and each organization is different and unique
and requires their own governance model. While there are four distinct types of
governance models (see Intranet
Governance: Ownership, Management & Policy)we (Prescient Digital Media) has never created the exact same
governance model twice. If you do not have experience with intranet governance
models then you may benefit from hiring an outside intranet
consultant to assist with the process.
Q - I feel that I own the intranet because I started
it by myself 3 years ago, but I’m not sure how to set up a real steering
committee.
A – If people don’t feel that you own it then you will
be challenged or replaced as the owner – you need to get an executive champion (someone
in senior management, preferably the C-suite). If you are being challenged for
the ownership of the intranet, then you most definitely need to hire an
external intranet
consultant or expert to help you navigate these politics.
Q - How are policies and standards enforced? How do
you make people respond to a new initiative?
A – Use a combination of the carrot and the stick:
reward participants, and punish the non-conformists. If the intranet is a good
one, with centralized technology and content management then the intranet
should sell itself (and would undoubtedly be less expensive for other groups to
use as their platform then maintaining and operating their own). However, if
they move to the central system, they have to sign-off on the governance (which
is also baked into the CMS or portal). For those that won’t cooperate, then
don’t link to their site, ensure the search engine doesn’t index them, and
don’t let them use the root intranet URL (this effectively banishes them to a
corner of the corporate universe that isn’t easily found without the exact
URL).
About the
author: Toby Ward is an intranet consultant (Internet consultant too) and the
founder of Prescient Digital Media.
He has worked with and improved many, many company intranets including Amgen,
HSBC, Mastercard, Manulife, PepsiCo, Royal Bank, etc. Toby and his company are
consultants for hire and can build your intranet or improve an existing
intranet You may contact
this intranet consultant directly via the Prescient Digital Media website
or email him at: toby{at}prescientdigital{dot}com.
You’ve
probably seen the term, or heard it bantered about by geeks, or maybe your head
is in it… but you may not fully understand the term “cloud” or “SasS” (software
as a service) or perhaps just think its another catchy marketing acronym like
MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server).
The “cloud”
refers to cloud computing that at the risk of over-simplifying is simply
hosting – computer, server, software, and other hardware and infrastructure
hosting. You’re already a cloud customer, probably many times over (someone is
hosting your email, website, blog, etc. In fact, 56% of internet users use
webmail services such as Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail – hosted email in the cloud).
In short,
hosting is provided as a service over the Internet. SaaS is simply hosted
software that could include your website content management system, search
engine, CRM (Salesforce.com), etc. The cloud is merely a metaphor based loosely
on those computer network diagrams that so cleverly depict little computers
with wires running between each other, servers, firewalls, etc.
I was
recently pressed on the subject of a “hosted intranet” and why an organization
shouldn’t outsource their intranet to “the cloud.” God forbid we let
professionals who know what they’re doing maintain our second-rate,
after-though, cost-center of an intranet!
It is
baffling to me that the intranet isn’t hosted externally for more organizations.
Well, I’m well versed with clueless executives with knee-jerk reactions around “security”,
privacy, and “the way things have always been done” but I guess I’m naïve to
have faith that more would start to embrace the 21st century. If these dolts
can Facebook then surely there’s hope, right?
The
biggest obstacle blocking the migration of more intranets to the cloud is
culture and fear of the ‘unknown’. If the host has proper security does it
matter if it’s hosted elsewhere? We do our banking online now – we can’t access
the intranet over the Internet?! Most of our benefits and compensation systems
are now hosted elsewhere in the cloud – we’re talking about people’s pay,
insurance and benefits!
In fact, if
it costs me less money and I don't have to worry about the maintenance then you
better believe I choose hosted – and I have told clients the same. Its one of
the reasons the "cloud" is expanding so fast. It would be 10 times
the size if people would just get beyond the knee-jerk reaction to have
everything in-house where it costs more, and probably enjoys less security than
the top of the line that many hosts employ.
The
downside to avoiding the cloud can be far more expensive: I have one client (identity
protected) who spent well more than $1 million on a new intranet design and
platform and it crashed in the first few minutes, never to go live again
because the organization didn’t have the proper infrastructure. One-and-one-half
years later, the intranet is still not live. This would never have happened had
it been turned over to a host. Instead, millions of dollars have been lost, and
countless thousands of employee hours.
Has your
organization embraced the cloud, or are you wasting valuable time and skills on
hosting and maintenance?
--
NEXT
WEBINAR:
What do
the best intranets look like? What are the best practices and principles for
redesigning an intranet? Having designed and re-designed dozens of intranet
sites (and websites), Prescient Digital Media’s Toby Ward and Catherine Elder
will draw on their experiences to provide best practices in approaching
intranet design.
In many ways, websites and intranets are like telephone systems – they assist us in accomplishing mission-critical work all the time but their true value is rarely measured.
Most people and organizations inherently know and understand the value of the telephone and don’t require a detailed ROI balance sheet before buying a phone. Like the telephone, most organizations inherently understand the value of an intranet, but don’t truly measure its value beyond HITS.
Failure to measure your intranet’s performance above and beyond simple analytics (e.g. HITS and page views) is a failure of responsibility (particularly in this economy where most organizations are looking cut costs wherever they find them).
Here are five noteworthy key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to adopt:
Sales – if you’re intranet is not helping your organization increase sales, then you’re missing out. It’s far too easy to accomplish with a little planning and execution. Among the benefits:
Provide the sales team with better information, more efficiently
User satisfaction – more important than what employees are reading, and how often / much, is their satisfaction with the intranet. How happy are they? In particular, user satisfaction with:
43% extremely/very satisfied the BT Homepage (down 5%)
3% dissatisfied with BT Homepage (no change)
Productivity – the intranet can significantly boost employee productivity and their ability to find information and tools to complete their work. Among the productivity metrics that Microsoft, IBM and BT track:
33% of Microsoft employee survey participants (33%) agree completely that the Microsoft intranet (MSWeb) saves them time
27% agree completely that MSWeb has helped to improve their productivity (8 or 9 on a nine-point scale)
80% IBM employees visit w3 (the intranet) at least once per day
68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs
52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on w3
48% agree the BT Intranet improves everyday working life
57% agree the BT Intranet saves me time in my working day
59% agree the BT Intranet helps me to be more efficient in my job
Stakeholder satisfaction – a far more critical and discerning audience are those managers and executives (stakeholders) that have a hand in or ownership of the intranet. Our intranet consultants (Prescient Digital Media) have solicited and surveyed stakeholders for their opinions and ratings of the for more than 100 intranet clients. Why? It’s not just about making users happy, but also making management happy.
Cost savings – why have an intranet if it’s not saving your organization money? Improved communications and HR are nice, soft benefits, but if the intranet is delivering those benefits, then it’s probably delivering cost savings that you just haven’t measured. Everything from paper, software, technology, administration, distribution / delivery, and travel costs to just about anything under the sun. There are hundreds of areas to save money with your intranet.
An intranet or website is more than a project or a piece of technology; it’s a mission-critical business system and a significant investment that requires proper planning.
Many intranets begin without a plan; many are redesigned without a plan. An intranet is far too expensive to leave to guess work, intuition, or a single-minded purpose such as communications or HR. In order to truly realize the full value of the investment the intranet must have a proper plan that accounts for all aspects of the business – including HR, IT, communications, operations, finance, etc. A proper plan begins with a thorough assessment.
Prescient has a five-phased approach or methodology that our Intranet consultants use to creating highly effective intranets and portals. The first phase of this methodology is the Assessment phase, where the business and functional requirements of the intranet or website are determined and documented.
Prescient's unique intranet project methodology
Despite the traditional focus on technology and integration, the most critical phases are the initial ones: Assessment and Planning. At the heart of an intranet's success is the strength of the plan that governs it, and a successful plan begins with a website or intranet assessment.
ASSESSMENT
Before undertaking any website plan or build, an extensive needs or business requirements assessment is necessary to identify, develop, prioritize, and document goals and current practices.
The assessment should include stakeholder interviews and input, as well as user research, and possibly stakeholder workshops. When building a leading-edge website, a detailed strategic blueprint can be crafted with the acquired data and knowledge including:
Creative
Information architecture
Technology
ROI plans
It is recommended that any organization consider engaging a third-party or consultant to conduct the assessment. While the cost may be prohibitive for organizations with tight budgets, a third-party may be more successful in gathering sensitive opinions and feedback as a third-party, unlike stakeholders, have no personal attachment or stake in the intranet and do not have any political agendas.
It is important to gather the needs and requirements of stakeholder and users, at the risk of failure; a representative sampling of user opinions is crucial to gathering an accurate reading on user needs and requirements.
Engaging Users, Identifying Needs
The first two phases, assessment followed by planning, are perhaps the two most important phases: without undertaking rigorous and thorough assessment and planning stages, the subsequent three phases will not realize their potential. The purpose of the assessment is to identify the organization’s needs and requirements. Steps in the assessment phase should include:
Current state site evaluation
Business requirements interviews
User surveys
User focus groups
Review of existing research (surveys, etc.)
Benchmarking (best practices)
Usability testing
Business and needs assessment
The assessment serves two important needs: it documents the needs and requirements of the user population, for the purpose of answering those needs.Before undertaking any site or portal design or redesign, regardless of the size of the project, a requirements assessment is necessary to identify, develop, prioritize, and document goals and current practices. As mentioned above, each engagement begins with an assessment that concretely identifies and documents the project’s goals and objectives, aligns those objectives with those of the sponsoring department and the enterprise as a whole, as well as documents the needs and requirements of the user audience and stakeholders.
Armed with the acquired data and knowledge, a detailed strategic blueprint – including creative, information architecture, and ROI plans – can be crafted to build a leading edge site. Individual modules in the Assessment Phase may include Stakeholder Engagement, User Research Review, User Survey, User Focus Groups, Benchmarking (sometimes conducted in the Planning Phase) and the delivery of the Key Findings Report.
Who
should own the intranet? Communications? IT? HR? All of them? You may be
shocked to learn that many companies don’t know the answer; in fact, many
organizations can’t clearly answer with any confidence whom is the present
intranet owner.
As is the
case with most intranets it is simply impossible to achieve any long-lasting
success without a clearly defined ownership and management structure. Far from
being a buzz word or jargon, intranet governance provides clarity and rules:
namely the titles, roles and responsibilities of its owners, managers,
stakeholders and contributors.
Sample governance model – large-sized
financial services firm
(Source: Prescient Digital Media)
Simply
put, governance defines an intranet’s ownership and management model and
structure including the:
Management team
Roles & responsibilities
of contributors
Decision making process
Policies & standards
Like the
content of your website or intranet, planning and governance is technology
agnostic; whether it’s SharePoint, IBM or another portal or content management system,
the necessity for and the approach to governance is the same. Given its
technology neutral status in governance is largely applicable to any technology
platform.
POLITICS
Politics
and the issues of control, ownership and standards go hand-in-hand with
intranet management and perhaps these issues, more than any other, have driven
the requirement for planning and defined governance models. Sadly, very few
organizations actually have a well-defined governance model, and many of those
have spent hundreds-of-thousands to millions of dollars on their website or
intranet – amounting to extraordinary investments left to chance and execution
on a whim.
Only 47% of organizations
have a defined governance model (32% have 6,000 employees or more; 11%
have 30,000 employees or more);
Of the tools and platforms
being used by survey participants, a whopping 47% are using SharePoint
(MOSS 2007) in some shape or form.
Politics
will kill your intranet. Without a well defined governance model (and should
your intranet survive the naturally occurring politics of competing priorities
amongst various stakeholders – communications, IT, human resources, various
business units, etc.) then the value the intranet or portal delivers will be
severely hampered.
OWNERSHIP
“If you
don’t have structure, you’re going to constantly run into politics,” said Terry
Lister, Partner and Leader of IBM Canada’s Business Consulting Services.
“Without a governance structure with standards, different silos try to do
something in parallel (their own thing) and it costs more… and will lessen the
user experience.”
Much of
the problem lies in the immaturity of this nascent intranet technology. With
the rational consolidation of intranet sites and services under a central site
or portal, disparate departments and stakeholders such as corporate
communications, human resources, IT and varying business units now must
cooperate under a lone umbrella with a single intranet home page. Along with
this ‘forced’ cooperation comes the predictable politics and competition for
ownership of the intranet (and competition for valued home page real estate).
The
problem lies with the traditional growth and evolution of the intranet.
Initially, when intranets first came online in the early to mid-1990s, they
were nothing more than a web brochure (a.k.a. ‘brochureware’) that sat on a
small server under the desk of a Web developer who served as designer, writer
and Webmaster.
GOVERNANCE
MODELS
I
categorize intranet governance by four broad approaches or models:
Decentralized (no single
owner; do-what-you-like)
Centralized a single owner or
department controls it all; highly bureaucratic; common in small organizations)
Collaborative (shared
ownership via committee)
Hybrid, centralized (single
owner, with collaborative accountability, decentralized content ownership)
COLLABORATIVE
GOVERNANCE
The most
common governance model in recent years, in medium to large-size organizations,
has been the collaborative model. The collaborative model is most often focused
on a cross-representative steering committee representing the major functional
stakeholders:
Communications
Human Resources
Operations
Information Technology
Business units / departments
This
model is most successful when the committee is championed by one or two key
executives, often the CIO, the head of Communications, or HR. Instead of no
owner, or one single owner, a collaborative team governs the intranet through
the application of policies, standards and templates. This committee is
typically responsible for the direction, vision, prioritization of projects,
and future evolution.
About
two-thirds of medium to large-size organizations have some form of collaborative
governance and some form of intranet ‘steering committee’ or council. They
typical committee has 6-10 individuals (mostly from IT, HR &
communications) and is focused on:
Mandate and vision
Business objectives
Policies and standardization
Project prioritization
Trouble-shooting and conflict
resolution
HYBRID,
CENTRALIZED GOVERNANCE
The
hybrid, centralized governance model is one that combines elements of all three
previous models:
Centralized ownership
Centralized policy making and
future development decision-making
Centralized technology and
content management platforms
Decentralized content
publishing and ownership
Decentralized application
ownership / management
The
hybrid model is very closely aligned to the collaborative model, with two
significant exceptions: there is often a supporting steering committee, but it
falls under a single intranet owner (or co-owners); and the role of IT is
usually reduced from a collaborative owner to a committee member without
ownership, but rather a support or enabler role for the business owner (often
communications or HR). So while the collaborative model has a committee as the
end intranet owner, the hybrid model puts the committee under an owner (though
sometimes this business owner is in fact IT).
FREE
WEBINAR
Learn
more about intranet governance during the free, one-hour webinar on September
23 (12pm EST). Contact
us directly to secure an advanced spot on the webinar.
