Those managing an intranet will find they are in a unique role in their organisation, as there are few if any others who touch the corners of an organisation the way those on the intranet team do. From the CEO to the staff member at the front line, everyone has a stake in the intranet. While this certainly provides great opportunity and insight into the organisation for the canny intranet manager, it also brings its own unique set of challenges.

On any given day, an intranet manager may spend time wrangling with content authors, working out how best to support the organisation’s latest strategic initiative, communicating the CEO’s latest message, training new content authors and developing new intranet functionality. Just as there are few other roles that cut across the organisation, there are few who will be asked to deal with the same degree of complexity and diversity as an intranet manager. In order to be successful, intranet managers must work across strategy, design, content, change and communications, technology and team.

Teams are often skilled in one or two areas and lack expertise and awareness elsewhere. The Intranet Hive is a new concept that can provide awareness of all the activities that need to maintained. Most of the literature to assist teams with the ongoing running of intranets has focused on the maintenance of the information architecture and the various technical components of the site, such as search. Whilst these are certainly important, there is a great deal more to running a successful intranet; the Intranet Hive recognises this and puts forward a more complete model for intranet management.

What is the Intranet Hive?

The Intranet Hive is a model that outlines 36 activities that underpin the ongoing management of an intranet. This article provides an overview of these activities in order to raise the awareness of intranet teams of the many activities that must be undertaken.

The Intranet Hive is being developed into a suite of products that includes heuristics for self-assessment so that teams can identify where they are today, a tool kit for each area so that teams can build their skills and an overall model to identify blind spots.

This is the first article in a two-part series on the Intranet Hive.

[January KM Column written by Cairo Walker, read the full article]