|
Features
Gathering marketing intelligence is a critical process for any company, particularly those launching a new product or service, looking to enter a new market sector, or seeking to merge with or acquire other companies. These major decisions can involve millions or even billions of dollars, and as a matter of course, companies need to be as informed as possible to execute plans that could result in tremendous success or financial disaster.
In organizations with successful intranets, the intranet champion is a C-level executive—a senior executive that reports directly to the CEO. This could be the CIO, CFO, COO, or perhaps the SVP for communications or human resources. There are organizations with decent intranets that have little support from the executive floor, but they’re not likely to have great ones. Without support from upstairs, an intranet’s potential value will be hobbled.
Columns
Web governance addresses the management structures, policies, and standards that are put in place by an organization in order to manage a web presence. For most organizations, intranet web governance is ad hoc or, at best, informal. While, in general, web governance is not effectively carried out on internet sites either, most organizations at least make some pretense at trying to establish web policies and standards for their websites (particularly if the organization operates in a capacity that requires rigorous compliance to standards related to information dissemination). Intranets, not being public-facing, lag even further behind for establishing effective governance. The ideal state for any organization would be to establish a formal web-governance model.
It is not easy to deliver a successful intranet. While the long-term goals for the site are generally clear, the challenge is how to get from here to there. The reality is that intranet teams rarely have sufficient resources to solve the “big problems,” and many roadblocks stand in their way.
Read_Me_File
Reviewed this Issue: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web; Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration; and Ross Mayfield’s Weblog
|