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.
According
to the Intranet
2.0 Global Survey:
- 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.
ADDITIONAL
READING
The
Politics of Intranet Ownership
Collaborative
Intranet Governance (Intranet Politics Part II)
Why
is the intranet so political?