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.
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.
Like
any business, an intranet without a strategy is an intranet looking
to die. Although an over-arching business strategy should be highly
complex that takes into account many external factors and variables
(e.g. competitive assessment), an intranet strategy is not as complex
nor time-consuming.
An intranet strategy
has definition, is well documented and shared by all stakeholders,
and has key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics. The strategy
provides direction for executable actions (in the context of this
article, we will treat strategy as synonymous with plan, though a
strategy in the broader definition might contain many plans). For an
intranet, a typical strategy would include the following elements:
1- Assessment –
understanding the needs and requirements for the intranet
2- Planning –
strategy development including the governance model and design
3- Technology –
where execution begins with the selection of the technology
4 – Implementation
– “the rubber hits-the-road” execution of the strategy
5- Marketing –
communications, change management, and promotion
Execution
“A
very general definition of the term “implementation” is execution
of an idea, plan, design, model, standard, algorithm, or policy,”
writes Prescient Digital Media's Cathy Mcknight in Implementing
your intranet plan and other dastardly deeds.
“In the realm of information technology, an implementation is the
realization of a technical specification as some type of computer
related system or applications. The key words being; plan,
specification and realization.”
In
short, if your plans are sound, then execution is relatively
straight-forward: everyone knows their job, the schedule, and the
budget. This of course is easier said than done and requires strong
project management to ensure that all plans are executed as directed.
Of course, even the best plans and projects have hiccups; all
technology projects hit barriers and are challenged by problems
(technology is imperfect, almost as imperfect as the people
implementing the technology). To overcome these problems and
challenges requires the aforementioned detailed plans, and a strong
project manager or three that has experience steering intranet
projects.
The
intranet is not just a piece of technology; not merely an IT project,
nor is it a communications vehicle or channel; the intranet is a
business system that should represent and support all areas of the
business. In fact, the intranet is one part technology, and many
parts people and process, that requires a detailed strategy (plans)
to ensure all work in tandem. No complex system such as an intranet
can adequately support a company and a workforce without a thorough
strategy.
Read
more on intranet strategy: Intranet
strategy - planning a successful intranet
Toby
Ward,
a former journalist, prominent writer, speaker on intranets and
intranet planning, is the President of Prescient Digital Media. To
learn how to undertake effective intranet strategy please see our
intranet service offering The
Intranet Strategy ,
or download the free Good-To-Great
Intranet Matrix.
For more information, contact
Prescient
directly.
