thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

Nearly two years ago, I sat up with interest as Jared Spool spoke about UE Governance at the UI East 10 conference in Cambridge, MA. I found his breakdown of UE governance models so simple and obvious that I’ve used it again and again as I have pushed for governance change at IBM. I thought I should reiterate it again here with due appreciation to Mr. Spool:
How is good Experience Design facilitated throughout a company?

1. A consultative approach, where a design team handles a small number of projects and consults directly.
2. A review and approve approach – establishes order and prevents “wild wild west,” eventually creates a compliance process bottleneck, a “policing” mentality, and can prevent progress.
3. An educate and administrate approach, where the entire organization focuses on the principles behind successful experience design.

“Intranet effectiveness” is one way to approach Intranet governance. It can succeed where where the company Intranet is large, scattered and when there are concerns about quality and cost of Intranet sites and applications. Also, this approach fits well where a traditional top-down governance model has not been successful. The idea behind effectiveness is to offer a more holistic way of identifying what makes a “good” Intranet site vs. a poor one. Effectiveness criteria go beyond “look and feel” to ask questions about useage, support, help and feedback, search and usability. Look and feel is important, but it’s not the only thing to look at when evaluating an Intranet.

Effectiveness programs can succeed by empowering site owners to rate their own sites. Creating a scorecard tool or even offering criteria in a simple spreadsheet document, site owners can answer the questions about effectiveness and rate their own sites, taking ownership of site quality, rather than having the more traditional “corporate says” approach which can create bad feeling.

In an increasingly virtual working world, Intranets must be a powerful and valuable expression of the organization’s brand and culture. Any company concerned about growth, retention and business process efficiencies will need a coherent and executable Intranet strategy to succeed.

I’m excited by Intranet management because it represents an intersection of great new technologies such as blogs, wikis and social tagging, with traditional Information Management concepts such as taxonomies, metadata, content authoring and editorial workflows.

In addition, any Intranet strategy inevitably struggles to find the right balance of power and process between the communicators and the technologists as well as the employer and the employee.