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 stakeholder – communications, IT, human resources, various business units, etc. – then the value the intranet or portal delivers will be severely hampered.

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 defining governance models.

One approach to governance is the committee approach whereby a committee of stakeholders representing a cross-section of the business set the strategy for the intranet or portal’s development. This next generation model of intranet governance is collaborative, with committees most commonly representing the major functional stakeholders in Communications, Human Resources, Operations, IT and business units. 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, conflict resolution and final key decisions as it relates to the intranet.

“One of the great successes of an intranet is to make a diverse set of resources — technology, content, and personnel — operate as one seamless and cohesive unit,” writes intranet consultant Paul Chin in his recent article Multi-Tier Intranet Ownership (Intranet Journal). “But this result doesn't happen without a certain level of cooperation among all those involved, those who have the foresight to see that the strength of another intranet sub-site can translate to the strength of their own section, and to a larger extent, to the strength of the entire system.”

In my recent Communitelligence seminar with Liam Clover from IBM (Intranet World Tour: IBM leads the World), we discussed governance models and IBM’s model for success that ultimately rests with a central steering committee called the On Demand Workplace (ODW) Steering Committee. The ODW Steering Committee includes representation from the CIO, Corporate Communications, Learning (very large budget), and HR. The other positions on the committee are non-permanent and amongst others including IBM Global Services, Software, etc. Those sitting on the Steering Committee are all SVPs and have the clout within the organization to make tough decisions with respect to budget and resources, policies and standards, and the future of the intranet.

As some of us with battle scars know all to well, sometimes tough decisions need to be made. However, wherever possible, consensus is strongly recommended. “The biggest ownership mistake involving large multi-disciplinary intranets is to appoint a single department such as IT or Communications as the sole governing body of the system,” says Chin. “An intranet has so many facets that it's next to impossible to run properly with a single owner, whether it be a person or a department.”

And while the IBM Steering Committee fosters collaboration and cooperation across the company there is an ultimate owner: the CIO. One detractor of the collaborative model is the committee approach to decision-making, which can be far slower and more bureaucratic than under the centralized (one owner) or decentralized (no owners) governance models. Hence the need to have an ultimate chairman who can make tough decisions when there is no consensus and decisions are tied-down in committee.

The steering committee also serves as a vehicle for conflict resolution that provides a forum for minimizing the politics of ownership. Finally, the collaborative model ensures different stakeholders think about the greater needs of the organization rather than just their specific functional silo and leads to the development of over-arching standards and policies. The necessity of “seeing the forest through the trees”  cannot be over emphasized.

If your intranet represents a large employee population (more than 500) and your company has well-defined business units or silos, then the committee or collaborative governance model is a must. In those organizations, the absence of collaborative governance often leads to either anarchy or a decision-making vacuum that can severely hinder the value of the intranet for many years.

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