Five intranet publishing models
Categorised under: Intranets
I’m doing a lot of writing about authoring and publishing on intranets at present. As part of this, I’ve outlined five fundamental basic models. Sketching these in outline form:
- fully centralised publishing
- decentralised publishing
- publishing with review
- federated publishing
- end-user content contribution
In a little more detail:
1. Fully centralised publishing
A central intranet team is established, which takes on responsibility for publishing and managing content on the site. Business areas contribute information via email, Word documents and other source documents. The central team takes the source information, and reworks it to match intranet requirements.
Advantages:
- increases content quality
- increases intranet consistency
- minimises training required
- simplifies technology requirements
- provides consistent resources for updates
Disadvantages:
- becomes a bottleneck
- content may not be written for the web
- limits subject matter expertise
- limits engagement from the business
- zero cost for business areas
2. Decentralised publishing
Decentralised publishing puts the responsibility for creating and maintaining intranet content into the hands of authors situated in business units across the organisation. Decentralised publishing model, where authors located within business units can publish directly to the site.
Advantages:
- harnesses the efforts of many authors
- more scalable
- gives responsibility to business units
- may provide more up-do-date content
- integrates content creation into business activities
Disadvantages:
- quality can be impacted
- consistency is harder to achieve
- sustaining effort can be hard
- can become chaotic unless managed
- publishing tools become vital
3. Publishing with review
Content is produced by decentralised authors within business areas, but is reviewed before being published to the intranet. In practice, these reviews may take a number of forms.
Advantages:
- ensures content is double-checked
- improves consistency and quality of content
- can catch mistakes
- improves accountability
- allows intranet team to keep track of changes
Disadvantages:
- requires additional effort
- can overwhelm the central team
- reduces the speed of publishing
- can create bottlenecks
- reviews can be limited in scope
4. Federated publishing
Business areas appoint a coordinator who takes responsibility for managing intranet authors within their area (this role is given many different names across organisations). The effect is to create the equivalent of a ‘mini intranet team’ within major business units, with the central team working closely with the coordinators.
Advantages:
- builds expertise in key business units
- offers as hybrid approach
- smaller number of people for the central team to work with
- reduces the load on the central team
- scales well
Disadvantages:
- requires business units to devote more resources
- coordinators must be qualified
- still requires strong management
5. End-user content contribution
In addition to having appointed authors using back-end publishing tools to create intranet content, staff staff across the organisation can contribute news items or content to the site directly. This could be via forms, wikis, blogs or other similar approaches.
Advantages:
- allows for broad staff engagement
- allows information to be published instantly
- addresses content needs
- simple for content contributors
- allows content to grow organically
Disadvantages:
- potential for poor content quality
- need to differentiate from reviewed content
- less structured and consistent
- may expose the organisation to business risks
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These are just outlines of the key points, and I’m writing full explanations for each, and more. But my question is this: have I missed anything?
Tags: authoring, governance, Intranets
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
7 Comments:
There is an advantage with the End-user content contribution:
It is possible to see who has the knowledge about the piece of content which in my opinion is very important for this publishing model.
See you at IntraTeam Event in March
This is great, would make a nice table or chart to compare them. Maybe a ‘2×2′ graph
Additional advantages for “Publishing with review” to consider: 1) protects client confidentiality and/or organization and 2) improves find-ability via search or views because the categorization is more consistent.
Additional disadvantages to consider: 1) must train central team about the context of the practice area in order to categorize or describe content usefully and 2) difficult to scale with sudden increases/decreases in contribution (I realize this is very closely related to your bullets about “overwhelming” and “bottlenecks”.
I think further differentiating Fully Decentralized from End User Content Contribution would be valuable. I see end user like the vision I have for our communities program and that it generally can exist along with the “Publishing with Review” approach. In other words, communities may gather informal, unofficial, or uncleansed content for their community and once it is rated worthy of reuse, best in class or “official” then it would be contributed centrally which is reviewed by the KM team.
Amy M. Edwards
I feel fairly strongly that no size fits all with respect to Intranets. I believe that innovation and the identification of solutions to address shortcomings in any space is delivered through diversity within the context of people engaged with a project or technology space.
The content of an Intranet space for me is as a tool to do my business, therefore connectivity to people, connecting to the business (e.g. clients attached to a site, staff numbers in the office and distribution across projects), business development material and learning material are all key elements in my mind to make an intranet fundamentally an everyday system that people use by default to find anything within the business.
I would say then that I believe that my perfect blend would be:
1. Centralised Publishing for key corporate type information managed for currency. This group would also look after and facilitate other aspects of the Intranet such as the inclusion of Federated Publishing.
2. Federated publishing would be facilitated and encouraged to keep the Intranet content within a business unit tied to the end user of that business unit or Office. Dedication to keeping information current, on the pulse as well as end user focused being the vision.
3. Additional tools connected to the Intranet such as Communities of practice allow for End User Content distribution which encourages connectivity to people and expertise.
The above seems to catch for me most of my requirements and would help a great deal in making the intranet a better place.
Of course keeping information up to date, relative and current is a huge job, particularly in a global organisation. Different types of organisation require different stratergies. By using the above three I see diversity in approach, spreading the administrative load and bridging corporate to end user.
I have been following your posts for some time being highly interested in this particular technology space. I look forward to more articles.
Hi Jason, this is exactly the mix of publishing processes we advocate! Not all content needs to be of equal quality, so formalised models should be restricted to key corporate content. Ways should then be found to engage both business areas and individuals in publishing useful, timely content.
Great article James.
Whilst I agree with most of Jason’s comments I feel that a really robust publishing model has not been arrived at yet.
End user content has the potential to be valuable but personally I would brand it as something other than the intranet just in case.
To me the only model that has the potential to work is a combination of the centralised and federated publishing where all content is assessed and formatted by the intranet team. To accomplish this the intranet team will need to become much more content and information oriented and develop different skills, skills that are information and people oriented.
The only way to remove duplication, contradictions and poor content is to manage content holistically. How would it look to the public if they accessed your internet site and found you saying one thing on one page and then totally contradicting yourself on another? Yet this seems to happen all too often in intranets.
@Patrick, any approach that requires the intranet team to look at *every* page before it goes live simply wont work. So I think the BT approach is roughly the right one: let’s call the whole thing the “intranet”, but give end users better ways of distinguishing between types of content.
Still early days on this, however, and I think we’ve yet to work out the best way of doing this.
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