Comments on: Five intranet publishing models

By: James Robertson

James Robertson — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:51:13 +0000

@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.

By: Patrick C. Walsh

Patrick C. Walsh — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:05:20 +0000

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.

By: James Robertson

James Robertson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:18:41 +0000

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.

By: James Robinson Outlines Five Intranet Publishing Models « The Law Firm Intranet

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:43:52 +0000

[...] available on the Internet that you should check out as well including James Robertson’s Five Intranet Publishing Models as outlined in his Column Two [...]

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:29:51 +0000

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.

By: Amy Edwards

Amy Edwards — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:43:31 +0000

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

By: Patrick Kennedy

Patrick Kennedy — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:26:13 +0000

This is great, would make a nice table or chart to compare them. Maybe a ‘2×2′ graph

By: Kurt Kragh Sørensen

Kurt Kragh Sørensen — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:01:54 +0000

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