Intranet Governance

By Martin White - Nov/Dec 2003 Issue Posted Nov 10, 2003

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There are three elements of an intranet strategy: an information/content strategy, a technology strategy, and a governance strategy. (See EContent, October 2003, "Behind the Firewall" column for more information). It is in the development of a governance strategy that most organizations fail to take account of organization issues, especially organization culture. Governance is more than "management," although a management structure is required. In my experience, few organizations have a formal intranet strategy. If they do, it was prepared several years previously and has never been reviewed and revised.

A governance strategy should include the following:

• Documenting the objectives of the intranet and ensuring they remain in line with organizational requirements
• Establishing and monitoring performance standards
• Establishing and monitoring standards and good practice
• Improving use and usability on a continuous basis
• Creating rewards and penalties for nonconformance
• Setting out job descriptions for intranet-related tasks
• Marketing the intranet

Intranet Management Structure
A common issue in many organizations is deciding who should "own" the intranet. Often intranets start off in the IT department before being acquired by departments that commonly include HR, corporate communications, and the library. The problem with one department owning the intranet is that content can be biased, and other departments tend to regard the intranet as not being their problem.

Over the last few years, I have found that the following management structure has worked well. Even if all the members of the operations group are in one single department adding in the steering group and the development group ensures that an organizational view is taken of requirements and resourcing.

The intranet strategy group is chaired by the sponsor of the intranet and includes the following roles:

• Monitoring performance against objectives
• Allocating resources and budgets
• Ensuring that the objectives of the intranet remain in line with business requirements
• Ensuring that agreed standards and good practice guidance are met

Of course this brings up the question of who should be the sponsor of the intranet. All the evidence suggests that without a senior level sponsor, intranets do not flourish and provide a significant benefit to the organization. There is a danger in having a sponsor who is too senior. Although having the chief executive as the sponsor may seem ideal at the time, in practice someone at this level just cannot spend the time in the meetings that will be essential if the intranet is to develop to meet changing organization needs. A sponsor who at least reports to a senior vice-president/divisional director is probably about right. The key issue is the extent to which the sponsor has access (even if indirectly) to the financial and other resources that the intranet will require.

The second group is the intranet operations group. This group comprises the intranet manager, other members of staff operationally concerned with the intranet, and a member of the IT department. This group is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the intranet.

The final group is an intranet development group. This is a group of users, but there are merits in allowing the group to identify ways in which the intranet could be enhanced. The chairman of the operations group and the development group are also members of the strategy group. This model ensures that there is some creative tension within the governance structure and that a balance is therefore kept between the requirements of users, the resources allocated by the practice, and the overall business requirements of the practice in terms of internal information access.

One Intranet or Many
The issue that many organizations have to address is whether to have one intranet or to allow each department to create their own intranet. There is no right answer. A governance model, set out in Figure 2 on page 5, illustrates the situation for an intranet that is in effect a federation of subsites developed by each department.

At the top are the intranet home pages. These will be a mixture of immediate news and navigation pages. Easily accessible from the top level of the intranet will be directories and glossaries. The directories could include staff and expertise databases and also links to other database applications.

In the model proposed, the home pages of each department are set out to agreed-upon standards that are monitored by the intranet team. The aim of these standards (denoted by the letter S), which are mandatory, is to ensure that there is adequate definition of the scope of each subintranet and that navigation between these subintranets can be achieved effectively. In particular, all the navigation must be designed so it is not necessary to know the departmental location of a document or which department is responsible for that business activity. Ideally, the intranet should support business processes, and not be solely the access route to a document repository.

Mention has been made of standards and good practice. It is important not to confuse the two. There should be a minimum number of standards, and these relate to file formats and sizes, metadata, disabled access, and the requirement to maintain content. Any failure to meet these standards should be regarded as a serious matter.

In addition, there are good practice guidelines (denoted by the letter G) that have evolved over a period of time but which are not mandatory. This enables each department to create a look and feel that represents its own work environment, without sacrificing the integrity and value of the intranet as a whole. These would be maintained primarily by peer pressure. The experience in many other organizations is that once other departments see the benefit of conforming to standards and adopting good practice, they are keen to do likewise, leaving any department taking a contrary approach very visible indeed.

Good practice may change from time to time and could relate to some aspects of the information architecture—the way that pages are laid out and the use of icons and other design elements. There should be encouragement for staff to experiment with these, so that improvements can be introduced to the entire intranet after proving their value in one section or in a departmental intranet.

Managing Standards and Good Practice
The more decentralized intranet content contribution becomes, the more important it is to set out workable and beneficial standards. All too often, a content management system (CMS) is installed to enable a wider range of staff to contribute content without realizing the role the intranet manager plays in setting implicit standards. One excuse for not setting out standards is that they inhibit creativity. Intranet creativity needs to be encouraged but also managed to prevent individual content contributors and departments turning their intranets into graphics-rich Web sites from which no information can escape!

The following are five aspects of standards management:

Standards development is best achieved through bringing together staff with relevant experience. It is important to distinguish between fitness to specification and fitness to purpose. A pragmatic view must be taken of the level of detail of the standards, so the process does not result in a long list of standards that are not only inappropriate to the intranet but also an enormous burden on the staff adopting them.

These standards might include the following:

The way pdf files are divided into manageable sections
• No acronym use unless defined either at a directory level or within the document
• Defining and using standard usability tests
• Summarizing all public documents summarized in about 200 words
• Readability tests for documents that may be read by visitors for whom English is not their native language
• All material conforming to the Web accessibility standards for users with visual and physical handicaps
• Specification of categories of document that would require Word and/or pdf and/or HTML versions to be made available
• Alphabetizing default format for lists

Standards publishing should be achieved by circulating a document with links into sections of the intranet that demonstrate the standard in action or even to external Web sites. The aim is to show the benefits of using standards. A good example is to illustrate the problems caused by multipage scrolling. Showing an example of bad practice from a Web site is much more effective than any strongly worded standard in print.

Standards conformance lies at the heart of the system. If there is no process by which staff members who ignore standards cannot be "encouraged" to conform, then the entire process is a waste of effort. There should be an escalation process, from a friendly e-mail up to a request from the chairman of the steering group to explain to a meeting of the group why the standard is being ignored. There may well be a very good reason, which may result in changing a standard.

Standards reviews should be carried out on a systematic basis. All too often standards are superceded for a good reason but remain in the standards collection. There should be a process of review that ensures all standards are reviewed on at least a 2-year basis. If a change is made, attention should be paid to the extent to which legacy content may need to be changed and the effort involved in doing so. Rather than change a standard (perhaps relating to the layout of tables) with immediate effect it may be better to change the review date of tabular material so that the revised format is adopted as the material is reviewed. This spreads the effort out across the staff and departments concerned.

Good practice is a much better term than best practice. In my view, there is no such thing as best practice, as this usually ensures that an intranet stagnates. Good practice may relate to the way that departmental organization charts are laid out. Then one department proposes an alternative. They are allowed to try this out, and feedback is gained from users, perhaps through the development group set out above. If the reaction is positive, then other departments can be encouraged to adapt their organization chart. Setting these charts out as a standard is usually impossible given the wide variation in departmental structures.

Job descriptions and evaluations
Intranet roles and responsibilities should be incorporated into job descriptions, so that intranet contribution moves from being a hobby to a key element in the achievement of the organization's business objectives. All too often, I find that intranet managers fitting their responsibilities around what is already a full-time position. If the organization is gaining benefit from the intranet, then the staff members involved need to have their contribution recognized. Only in this way can issues of work overload and training requirements be discussed with managers in a formal environment.

For some organizations with highly structured job specifications, deciding on the level and scope of intranet manager can be a complicated process. A few years ago, I was working for a major financial organization and made a number of recommendations about changes to their intranet strategy. All were quickly adopted with the exception of deciding on a job specification for intranet staff, as this would require discussions with unions and the possible staff working on the Web site.

Usability
There is gradual, but now accelerating, awareness of the importance of usability in intranet design. On a public Web site, visitors will either put up with it or find another site. On an intranet, users will take the view that the intranet team should have known better. The usual excuse is that "Staff use it so often they soon work out how to use the intranet." They don't—but they don't tell anyone!

Assume that through enhancing usability and content you can improve the information access productivity of each member of staff by 5 minutes a day. On an annual basis, this is a saving of around 20 hours per person, or 0.6 of a working week. So for every 90 users, you gain the working capacity of an extra member of staff as well as making speedier and better decisions. That is why usability is so important to the bottom line.

Usability tests should be carried out with individual and representative members of staff. The tests should be based on specific business processes—for example, finding a vacation form or checking on the progress of a project. The navigation path should be recorded (this can be done by recording the users speaking aloud as they go through the process), the timing, and the comments made at the test. It is important to provide feedback at the end of the tests, indicating the changes that are being considered. In that way, staff members participating in the tests feel that their time is being well used.

Marketing the benefits
Underlying the entire process has to be an effective marketing strategy. The objectives of this marketing strategy should be as follows:

• To promote the overall business value of the intranet
• To raise awareness of what content is on the intranet and how staff can use this to make more effective decisions
• To develop ongoing communication with staff to ensure that concerns and suggestions are fully considered.

Setting out a full intranet marketing strategy is beyond the scope of this article, but its importance cannot be overrated.

In conclusion
In this article, I have only touched the surface of intranet governance issues. I have not discussed topics such as intranet surveys, skill sets for intranet managers, and the legal issues, all of which need to be taken into account in managing an intranet.

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