Intranets were never meant to be so centralised
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets
Intranets were first created as a hobby project in most organisations, meeting some small need or targeting one group of staff. The potential benefits were quickly recognised, and intranets spread throughout their organisations in an organic way. Before long, intranets consisted of thousands or tens of thousands of pages, published by almost every business unit.
In time, the value of this started to be recognised by organisations, along with the need to better manage these sprawling sites. Intranet teams were born, and structure and order were brought to intranets. Perhaps in reaction to the mess created by sustained organic growth, many intranet teams instituted rigid publishing policies and formalised workflow.
Intranet authoring became more tightly managed, restricted to just a few authorised publishers in each business unit. In the process, intranets became “read only” sites for the majority of staff, useful at their best but too often out of date.
Unnoticed, we quietly came to a fork in the road, and went down the route of traditional, formalised publishing. Which is a pity.
Intranets were never meant to be so centralised, so reliant on just a few to maintain thousands of pages. This is not realistic, and it’s not effective.
When wikis came along, they were therefore seen as a revolution, a new way of managing content. Death to the stuffy old intranet, bring on enterprise 2.0 and intranet 2.0. In the process, however, too many of the lessons learnt from “traditional” intranets have been forgotten in the naive belief that “content will manage itself”.
What we need to do, as always, is find the middle path. Intranet content was always intended to be maintained by many staff, those with the actual knowledge. On top of this, we then need all the benefits that come from best practice usability and information architecture, including great navigation and search.
This doesn’t mean an end to centralised intranet teams, quite the opposite. The need for true leadership has never been greater, we just need to combine it with a return to the democratic vision of intranets that originally existed.
Your thoughts?
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
11 Comments:
Yes, a neat act to balance though. I think we need to establish good practices and a supporting structure that enables people to post, host and manage their content without being overwhelmed or over governed. Tricky bit is when their enthusiasm gets the better of them and we end up with the labyrinth of unmanaged and ageing content.
Agree that this is a hard balance to obtain in practice. Neither of the two extremes work: fully centralised is a bottleneck, while fully decentralised is anarchy.
I’m writing about authoring models at present, and I’m covering five fundamental approaches:
1. fully centralised publishing
2. decentralised publishing
3. publishing with review
4. federated publishing
5. end-user contributed content
Using a mix of these, recognising that not all content needs to be of equal content, perhaps points the way forward.
I fully agree and look forward to your authoring models and to seeing you at IntraTeam Event in March.
All content is not equal – fully agree! In my approach to intranet governance I always recommend organisations to think about the different ‘content zones’ that already exist in their day-to-day reality (in- and outside the intranet). The intranet governance then should reflect these differences by applying different specificities to the aspects that need to be governed for the respective ‘zones’.
I found this to work really well and be easily understandable both for intranet teams, sponsors and stakeholders as well as for the users themselves.
Regardless of the model, a site needs an aim or purpose that is clear enough for someone to be able to say whether content deserves publication or not. All content is certainly not equal but one way or another you need some guideline on what shouldn’t be there at all, whether you’re in a central team publishing strictly controlled core content or a business unit with barely anything online.
James,
I agree with what you say. BT is already achieving this on its intranet. Every person can be both a user and publisher on our intranet.
We have a small centralised team who do strategy, governance, standards, etc. but responsibility for publishing is with the owner of the content.
Our standards are used for all types of publishing – authoritative CMS published content to blogs.
So far BT has gained most of the benefits without many of the drawbacks. Social media is now mainstream in 2009 for our intranet.
I’m updating on progress with this on my blog if you’re interested.
Mark
Hi Mark, great to hear progress at BT. I’ll add your blog to the 250+ that I already follow.
The advancement of technology has made us less social, although we have more reach. We share more with people we know better – we know that. So now, we know a lot more people but at the surface level, should we then care to share even if the tool enables user-generated content? I agree that content should be contributed by the staff in the domain, but they wouldn’t like to do it, even though it’s formalised. So I feel that the central intranet team has a facilitation role to play – to find out the ground working issues and approach the relevant staff for content that would help. This will help them perceive the worthiness of their contributions. Publish stories of such contributions to cultivate a shared sense of social responsibility for the intranet – easier said than done, but it’s a step forward to the good old days
Hi Simon, I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that the central team should play a “facilitation” role. If we just throw out tools to the whole organisation and say “go publish!”, nothing useful will happen. So even in a more “democratic” publishing approach, there is a key leadership role for the central team to play.
One of the first steps is for the central team to recognise that: a) their job is not to publish everything b) the goal is not to control everything c) they play a key role in supporting/encouraging/facilitating/leading.
In certain circunstances I could see a lot of value in dis-integrating monolithic intranets. Splitting an intranet up into discrete parts that are smaller and make more sense to the user may IMHO provide great benefits. However I still think that all content must be managed holistically behind the scenes to ensure that the intranet doesn’t descend into the death spiral of poor content, duplication and dislocation often caused by decentralised publishing.
@Patrick, agree with both of your comments.
At the end of the day, I guess the point I’m making is this: don’t manage the intranet like a printed book or externally-released publication. Formal, traditional publishing processes should only be applied to very specific areas of the intranet, with a mix of publishing models used for the rest of the site.