Different intranet governance approaches work better in different types of work environments. A company with a weak management structure that doesn’t prioritize and coordinate organizational change may have trouble with the federated model, for instance.

A highly hierarchical organization may have trouble with user-generated content.

* content
* communication
* collaboration
* activity

Only when there’s the right balance (and you need all four) is the intranet reaching its full potential. You can hear more about this on one of our slidecasts:

http://www.slideshare.net/jamesr/the-four-purposes-of-an-intranet

However, I don’t really think these structures are of much use in moving forward so as to finally deliver on the potential & promise of intranet systems. What these systems describe, in one form or another, is an underlying chaos which needs to be contained by varying systems and degrees of restraint. Utilizing these systems what we see are many companies “successfully” implementing intranets that in the end do very little other than offer a palid set of reference services.

In my own work as a software developer, I’m moving towards intranet systems as a gateway for k.worker to k.worker collaboration, and k.team to k.team collaboration. In that sense, the intranet becomes a place where the information structure of individual projects gets published, with varying degrees of access to all.

The role of the intranet manager then becomes not one of editing and review, but rather connecting possibilities.

We do agree in that yes we need to adopt a new approach and experiment. However IMHO the quantity of content is the real problem and none of the models above really deal with this problem. If you keep doing the same things don’t be surprised when you keep getting the same results.

That’s why I think a concept like the Lean Intranet, might work
http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/manage/3906
It at least proposes a solution for holistically managing content and a pragmatic way of getting there – kaizen

It’s easy to state “all content must be perfect”, but show me an intranet that achieves this! Intranet teams too easy frustrate authors and burn themselves out trying to achieve this. For this reason, I would argue that not all content needs to be of equal quality.

Instead, we need to target limited central team and decentralised publisher resources to the highest-value content. Yes, this is a pragmatic approach, but what’s the alternative?

Mark Morrell from BT (British Telecom) has written some great stuff on what they’re doing in this space, in terms of setting up multiple levels of governance, and helping users to understand what they’re looking at. Still early days, but I like this mature approach to a complex problem, and look forward to more organisations experimenting in similar ways…

At the end of the day, we’ve been trying to “fix” intranet content for a decade with very little impact. Perhaps it’s time to try a different approach? :-)

You talk about a ’sea of pages’ but don’t mention how such a huge quantity of content is to be controlled which is the real problem. Only ‘value’ content should be visible to the user and the aim should be to reduce content in the intranet making it more usable and useful.

Patrick