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Managing intranet content

One of the primary purposes of intranets is to deliver accurate information to staff. Going beyond corporate policy and procedurse, intranets help business units deliver key information to the rest of the organisation.

Managing this content is not easy, particularly as the volume of pages grows. The right authoring and publishing models need to be put in place, with support and resources for authors. Intranet teams also need to target their efforts to the highest-value content.

Five fundamental publishing models

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In our work with organisations, we’ve come across five fundamental publishing models:

  1. fully centralised publishing
  2. decentralised publishing
  3. publishing with review
  4. federated publishing
  5. end-user content contribution

These are described in the article Five intranet publishing models, including a brief description of strengths and weaknesses for each. In practice, a mix of approaches will be required, including variations on a theme where appropriate.

Many different ideas

We have worked with many intranet teams to develop strategies for improving and maintaining intranet content.

We have brought all these ideas together into a single mindmap (PDF) that shares ideas across many different categories.

This can be used in a number of ways:

  • Highlight on the mindmap all the activities and ideas you are already doing, and identify where the gaps lie.
  • Conduct further research into potential ideas and approaches, using the mindmap as a starting point.
  • Clarify team and individual responsibilities relating to intranet content.
  • Help the team to break out of old habits, giving an opportunity to consider new ideas.
  • Gather together the intranet team and decentralised authors, and use the mindmap to discuss the current situation, and possible improvements.

Authoring models and content quality

The challenge with intranet content is trying to “fix everything”, and therefore spreading the team too thinly across the large and diverse intranet. Instead, effort should be focused on the highest value content, and ensuring that this meets staff needs.

Authoring models also need to be established that find a balance between fully centralised (always a bottleneck) and fully decentralised (often chaos).

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