There’s an adage that is old for the intranet age (since they came to be mainstream in the early 90s) that says you shouldn’t put anything on the intranet that you wouldn’t put in print. It relates to the older adage that you shouldn’t print anything that you wouldn’t want anyone outside the company to read.

Your content is valuable. You wouldn’t want to share most of it with the outside world – especially the competition or media. However, if you are making content available via the intranet then it is possible it can be leaked externally. The number one leaking culprit, of course, is the employee.

There are three general positions or models to adopt vis a vis content protection:

• Open market – publish just about anything you can on the corporate intranet.
• Closed market – put sever constraints on what can be published.
• Asynchronous market – a hybrid model that entrusts employees with a certain level of responsibility to maintain confidentiality.

My own personal opinion is that if you’ve hired and trusted an individual to do a job that the organization deems crucial enough to justify the pay then most individuals are trustworthy and not likely to leak confidential information to outside sources. On the other hand, I wouldn’t publish any corporate top secrets either. As such I recommend most companies adopt an asynchronous model that assumes a certain level of responsibility and trustworthiness of employees but does not make widely available all information and data to all employees.

Regardless, intranet and corporate information managers do have a responsibility to inform employees of their responsibility and to limit the organization’s liability. Such action includes the development of several policies:

• Editorial policy
• Terms of use
• Acceptable use

Editorial policy

Your editorial policy is less of a legal security blanket and more of a definition of roles and responsibilities of those developing and maintaining online content. The editorial policy should include details on...

• content types
• style acceptability
• news determinants (e.g. currency, impact, etc.)
• formatting
• archiving
• photo treatments and bylines
• content management system rules and directions
• copyright and legal
• privacy and security
• governance including roles and responsibilities
• taxonomy (classification)
• site registration and indexing

Terms of use

Terms of use is a standard legal disclaimer. It says who owns it and declares the copyright, disclaims accuracy of content, etc.

Acceptable use

Acceptable use spells out the rules. Thall shall not...

• Email content outside of the company.
• Print and distribute content outside of the company.
• Release content to any media outlet.
• Rewrite or reproduce content for personal purposes or profit without the expressed written consent of the company (legal department).

Page footers

If you’re not already doing so make sure you have coded into your style sheets or CMS templates a footer that always includes the following:

• A legal disclaimer
• Terms of use
• Copyright stamp
• Name and email address of author
• Date of publish

While clients have hired me to develop these policies and standards the work is not really rocket science. It just takes a little time and thought that could save your organization some headaches in the future.

Can anyone set-up an intranet site in your company? However they want, whenever they want?

Yes, yes and yes is the standard answer at most companies. Believe it or not.

A couple of weeks ago I talked a little about IBM’s intranet and how they had nearly 10,000 intranets a couple of years ago. They now have about 5,000...

What is the cost of managing all those renegade sites in your organization?

Cost considerations aside, why should we reign in intranet sprawl? Well technical and security reasons are also top of mind.

Paul Chin recently wrote on IntranetJournal.com....

-  “Renegade applications (including intranet sites) raise many concerns for IT teams responsible for maintaining overall IT integrity because they:

-  Are not included in IT's official security model — internal and external security, user and group access control, and authentication method.

-  Are not included in IT's overall application integrity plan — system architecture, maintenance and backup procedures, and disaster recovery and business continuity.

-  May have been built with non-corporate standard development tools, language, and platform of which only the developer (and no one from the official IT development teams) is familiar with.

-  Are at risk of being abandoned should the developer leave the company.

Another good reason to halt intranet sprawl before it advances: your users. Having dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of intranet sites will confuse and irritate your users. Theirs one universal complaint: “I can’t find anything."

If you’re looking to do a redesign and don’t have budget to do an inventory of the sites on your intranet. Then go to your CFO and tell him how much this is costing the company and how much you can save the company if you reign in that intranet sprawl... you could be a hero!

One of the keys to success for retailers such as Dell and Wal-Mart is inventory control. Knowing what inventory or products they have, how much of it, and how it relates to customer demand (e.g. what are they buys, when will it run out, how much do we need to order).

Your intranet or website offers a product: content (either static, dynamic or in the form of a tool or application). And content remains king. It is the most valuable thing you offer your employees or readers. But do you know the state of your content? Is it up to date? Who owns it? How much do you have?

Dell and Wal-Mart offer a practical lesson for the world of intranet: success is partly predicated on knowing what you have.

The challenge is volume. If your intranet is like most, then your intranet portal and/or sites have a lot of content. It’s rare that I work with a client intranet that has less than 100 – 500 pages of intranet content per employee. IBM has more than 10 million known pages (more than 300 pages per employee).

While knowing what you have is important it can be time consuming but highly worthwhile for a number of reasons:

• business continuity – ensuring employees have the right information to do their job
• cost efficiency – stale or wrong information or data can be eliminated
• employee productivity – maintaining and prioritizing information so that the most valued and used information is easily retrieved
• business priorities – determine what content and information is needed to drive an effective business

“Intranets grow and become more content heavy, ownership moves from one department to another, and business processes as well as their user base will change throughout content's lifecycle,” writes Paul Chin, an intranet consultant and writer, in Taking Stock: Intranet Content Audits. “Over time, content that goes unchecked can be lost, forgotten, or even become a burden on the system. It can be relegated to the darkest recesses of the system never to be seen again.”

Undertaking the audit is the most time-consuming task. We often recommend that a client use a web analytics tool such as WebTrends to identify all the pages and content on the various intranet servers and then visit each one-by-one to identify:

• content type
• content relevancy
• date of publish
• owner/author
• status: save it, update it, or delete it 

One client of ours at a 750 person company used two summer students armed with a browser and an MS-Excel spreadsheet to track and document all 10,000 pages on their intranet. It took them one month and a half to document all 10,000 pages (about 3,000 pages per auditer per month). The good news was they identified all the content and found that only 4,000 of the 10,000 pages were of any value. In one full swoop they wiped out 6,000 pages which saved them a lot of server space and maintenance costs not to mention helped preserve business continuity and accuracy of information.

Content is king therefore it needs care and pampering.

As I’ve written before, one of the great rewards of being a traveling intranet consultant is the opportunity to learn from many organizations, clients and colleagues about their intranet success and failures.

I’ve had the privilege to come to know and learn why Xerox continues to be an intellectual leader which is well exemplified by their intranet portal, WebBoard.

WebBoard is actually a series of internal websites but they are held accountable to defined governance, style and standards. The governance model is what I consider text-book ideal for most organizations (though what is good for one is not necessarily good for another). The intranet is owned by corporate communications but ultimately governed by a small senior executive team. Policy includes effective use and intranet development – with guidelines on content, technology, etc.

This policy and the accompanying standards create a unified, seamless user experience that is a hallmark of most successful intranets.

“It brings people to one seamless experience from an intranet perspective for broader employee access to tools and information,” says Karen Allen, Manager of Employee Communications and the Xerox WebBoard. “There’s a sense that it is familiar, you’re not jumping to different sites or experiences – we’re trying to create a simple, seamless experience so users know what to expect.”

The home page features true portal functionality including individual personalization and role-based customization (e.g. human resources professional, marketing communications, internal information, technology support, etc.). Customization options include stock market ticker, news sources (still working on external news feeds), organization news, weather, and formatting options.

All 58,100 Xerox employees have intranet access and the site enjoys 3-4 million page views per month – roughly two page views per employee per day. Not bad at all. That’s an engaged user population.

I believe however the key to Xerox’s intranet success has been their strategy. They developed a plan with defined objectives and goals and they engaged and involved both employees and senior executives in developing their strategy.