Governance: publishing, approving, prioritizing
January 7, 2010A member of NetJMC&Co (Linkedin group for intranet managers created by JMC) recently asked for some guidance on governance.
He expressed 3 needs:
- 1. Explain how a piece of content goes from idea to published
- 2. Define who is responsible for approving content
- 3. Explain how application development gets prioritized
My contributions to the Linkedin discussion….
Three governance angles
Although every organization needs to "find" their own intranet governance policies with the right balance of control and liberty, there are some fundamental principles that apply in all situations, or at least every situation I have seen.
Point 1: Publishing content.
A general principle: You'll need to have several paths.
Intranets have different spaces with different dynamics and therefore different "rules of the game". The place where reference documents are published will be managed very differently from where teams put their working documents and still differently from a "blog central" or space where users create content directly.
Point 2: Approving content
Two main principles:
- Keep the responsibility for publishing content at the lowest level possible, but at a level where the person is still accountable for the content.
- Have as little workflow and pre-publication approvals as possible.
Point 3: Prioritizing application development
Understand the impact of the development(s) on users and on the business. Work with the business and functional managers, and also end-users of the application. Of course, you'll involve the "owners" of the app, but their views are often too subjective when asked what the impact will be.
Evaluate the the different development options by asking these questions:
- - Will this enable people to do something they could not do before?
- - Will this enable people to do something better (faster, easier) than previously.
- - Will this reduce costs?
- - Will this increase our revenue?
- - Will this bring a new or improved service to our customers (external, I mean).
You can then prioritize based on a simple rating scale where you weight the answers to the questions according to your organizations current and near future goals and needs.
Two critical pitfalls to avoid
A. Do NOT define the governance by a team located in head-quarters or the center of the organization. Involve a small, representative group of people throughout the organization.
B. Do NOT define governance by a group of "support" or "functional" people. (IT, HR and Communication managers.) Involve business people in the organization.
How, not what
My final comment – based on having worked with many organizations on their governance policies – is this: "The WAY you define governance is more important than WHAT you define."
January 11th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
The post triggers some questions for me. If intranet managers are trying to decide to publish or not publish why is this different from daily decisions any other manager in a business makes about activities under their control? Mostly these are made (or meant to be made)on the basis of cost and benefit.
In our studies of Intranet tasks we find a low number of tasks that are directly connected to the core competence of organisations – tasks that connect directly to how they actually make money or define their special value in the marketplace. Senior managers often view the Intranet as distant from the real business and discourage teams from engaging too directly in case it wastes their time. Debates about “content” and “workflow” reinforce this perception.
Does publication increase sales or decrease costs? How much? And how? Tough questions but they have to part of governance.
January 14th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Brian, I agree with the spirit of your comments, but not with some of the specifics.
Firstly, the intranet managers are not deciding to publish or not publish. Based on my research, I have seen that where intranets are becoming or have become workplaces for organizations (stages 2 or 3), publishing is part of the jobs of many people throughout the organization. The intranet manager is more of a facilitator than a publisher. It is in less mature intranets that the intranet manager does all the publishing.
I would also say that the core business of enterprises is one aspect of intranets and is – I totally agree – often neglected. Fortunately, this is less the case today than a couple of years ago.
What I feel is more important is that there are many activities that support the core business and they cannot all be related in quantitative numbers to increasing sales and decreasing costs. I find this too simplistic, a sort of “CFO-blinders” approach.
There are other dimensions of enterprise activities that are part of the intranet landscape: networking, brainstorming, exchanging ideas, good practices, collaborative working on documents, etc.
Task support is only part of what intranets must do, but there is much more. What do you have in mind when you refer to “debates about content and workflow”?