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.

RELATED ITEMS:

The Politics of Intranet Ownership

Collaborative Intranet Governance (Intranet Politics Part II)

Intranet management is plural

Why is the intranet so political?

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Xerox Demonstrates Intranet Success (back issue)

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(PARIS) Only one in five organizations have senior executives that think the intranet is mission-critical, according to Jane McConnell’s annual Global Intranet Trends Report. While this is embarrassingly low, and quite frankly shameful, this is up 5% from last year. Frankly, however, it’s far too little and most likely too late for far too many organizations.

At this rate a majority of corporations will treat their intranet with the importance it deserves sometime in the next decade. The remainder will follow in their footsteps sometime over the next millennia. I am wholely embarrassed for these executives who probably would rate their customer-facing website as mission-critical, but openly neglect and screw-over those employees whose job it is to serve those customers!

Some other disturbing trends:

• Only 20% of study participants ‘absolutely’ agree that the intranet’s primary purpose is to facilitate collaboration
• Only 22% absolutely agree that the intranet’s primary purpose is to facilitate productivity
• 60% absolutely agree that the intranet’s primary purpose is to distribute information
• “Help generate business opportunities” is not seen yet as an important purpose of the intranet

I guess the intranet is nothing more than a newsletter with a phone directory for most. It is sad, but true. Of course, this won’t change unless you (both intranet managers and consultants) learn to put on your sales hats and begin promoting the potential of the intranet by actively showcasing leading examples (many of which have been highlighted here on IntranetBlog.com (see the Intranet Case Studies) because these narrow-minded, old-school, windbag executives won’t learn any other way. So it is incumbent on you to ‘sell’ the intranet.

Nor surprisingly the top 3 “serious obstacles” according 40% of respondent organisations:

1. Intranet not seen as a priority
2. Lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet
3. Lack of ownership at a senior level

My rant notwithstanding, and not to undermine the quality of this superlative report, Jane’s report is a very good read chalked full of excellent statistics and findings. Here are some more findings from Jane (see Highlights from the 2007 Global Intranet Survey Reports - just published) of the study of 178 company intranets (medium to large organizations with 5,000 to 100,000 employees:

• The intranet already is “the way of working” or will be in 1 or 2 years for over half the organisations in the survey population. Half say that today employees would be disturbed in their work if the intranet “went down” for 1 to 2 hours, with the figure reaching 3 out of 4 if it “went down” for 24 hours.
• 3 out of 5 organisations are “not really satisfied” or “not satisfied at all” with their intranet search.
• Well over half respondents have “less than one person” who works on supporting and optimising search. Very few have taxonomies, and not nearly enough do analysis on the search logs.
• Intranet 2.0 tools and technologies are being tested by a majority of organisations and visibly integrated into the intranet by many.
• Organisations where the intranet already is or will soon become “the way of working” are more involved in 2.0 than the others. 4 out of 5 compared to 3 out of 5 in the full survey population).   
• 1 out of 3 of these organisations have established an official 2.0 strategy. 

The Global Intranet Trends Report is a very worthwhile report and should be used as a frequent reference for building your intranet business case. You can purchase it for $525 – or even better, purchase the enhanced he Global Intranet Analysis Report at $1175.