Question: Our intranet has been owned by just about every department in the organization. It started in IT, who then handed it over to marketing because they managed the corporate site. It turned out that they had no interest in internal communications, so our corporate communications team took it on. Now this team is being disbanded and our intranet is about to be rudderless. Any suggestions as to who should be taking responsibility for the management of the intranet?
Answer: This is not an uncommon situation. Other intranet owners can be the library or the HR department. Ultimately, there seems to be a lot of hard work and little glory in managing an intranet so it's no wonder that departments are keen to pass it on. The fundamental problem is that an intranet is an organization-wide asset; it appears on every desktop and supports every member of staff in their work. Yet amazingly, very few companies have developed an overall intranet strategy. Late last year I was at a conference in the Netherlands, attended by delegates from more than 100 major Dutch organizations, and on a show of hands, only a few had a documented intranet strategy.
The answer to the question starts with the development and ownership of a strategy for the intranet, especially when the organization has spawned multiple intranets. The three core elements of the strategy should be the content of the intranet; the technology platforms that will deliver it; and the policies on standards, good practice, and a host of other governance issues. Through the development of this strategy, the needs of users will be kept in balance with the resources needed to contribute and manage content. There also must be a process for updating this strategy on an annual basis to reflect changing business requirements and expectations.
It is the resources issue that usually results in the intranet operations being moved around the organization as each department in turn realizes just what is involved. This is especially true when a case starts to be made for investment in content management software—and no one wants to give up their budget for this investment.
Only through the development of an intranet strategy can the resources be quantified and related to the benefits for the organization of having better access to information. Of course, being able to convert these benefits to cash is impossible. An approach I find useful is to highlight the risks of not investing. Most organizations now understand the implications of risk very well indeed.
Out of this strategy work it will often become apparent that there is no obvious department to take ownership of the intranet. In cases like this I find that the only solution is to treat the intranet as a project. A project board should be set up that represents the key stakeholders in content contribution, such as HR and internal communications. There should also be a user panel to provide feedback into the project team about the effectiveness of the intranet, and ideas for content and information architecture enhancement. The day-to-day operation of the intranet can also be managed by a team that may be seconded on a part-time or full-time basis from a range of departments.
This is also not an easy concept for many organizations to grasp, but where there is a project management culture in the organization, this approach can be very effective. The overall aim is to keep a balance between the needs of users and the workload on content contributors and reviewers. There is no reason why the intranet manager should necessarily also be the project manager.
Of course, there are probably many organizations where this Grand Strategy approach is not going to be acceptable. An alternate approach is then to develop a Service Level agreement for intranet support so that all concerned know the level of staff resource that will be made available and who, ultimately, is the manager with responsibility for meeting the agreement.