Who is the owner of intranet

Crown jewels from Shutterstock. Filed under: Articles , Intranets. One of the first challenges when establishing an intranet is to determine who should have overall ownership of the site, and where the intranet team should be located. While the responsibility for driving the intranet must be given to a single business area, this group must be located within the right area of the organisation if the intranet is to succeed.

This briefing explores a number of common intranet owners, and discusses the pros and cons of each group. It then presents some general guidelines and approaches for selecting where to place the intranet team.

Historically, most intranets were owned and managed by IT teams. While IT must always be responsible for maintaining the technical infrastructure and development aspects of the intranet, this is only a small component of the intranet as a whole. With intranet teams needing strong content and communication skills, they are increasingly moving out of IT areas and into the rest of the organisation. Internal communications or public affairs teams are obviously equipped with the comms and content skills needed to drive an intranet, and therefore make obvious intranet owners.

Human resources HR are often the publishers of the greatest volume of intranet content, and are therefore a key intranet stakeholder. For top executives, it can be a powerful tool for communicating with rank-and-file workers.

For rank-and-file workers, it can be an efficient way to handle benefits, taxes, and the like. And for all of the managers and skilled professionals in between, it can be a device for breaking free of hierarchy and stirring up ideas. By serving all of those functions, the intranet can do more than just solve specific problems; it can nurture the entire corporate culture.

If overseers have too firm a hand, they will draft rules that can make it harder for people to create new pages, post new content, and generate new ideas in concert with colleagues. The result: The site will become tightly controlled and essentially lifeless. Eric Hards has seen that dynamic firsthand. Every day, employees come to the site looking for information about medical benefits, salary-savings plans such as k s, and other HR matters.

But users needed something that they could understand. During World War II and then during the Cold War, Lockheed was famous for its skunk-works operation — a remote outpost in the eastern-California desert where engineers designed and built advanced military aircraft.

Far from headquarters and largely free of bureaucracy, engineers simply did their thing. Keeping authority figures at bay is especially crucial when it comes to building communities where like-minded people can exchange ideas, even if they are thousands of miles apart. Schlumberger Ltd. Three years ago, its CEO and chairman, Euan Baird, authorized the creation of Eureka, an intranet-based grouping that brings together technical experts from around the world.

Typically an employee with interest in the given area is allowed to set up the site and run with it but we still recommend strict monitoring of these sites to prevent them from getting out of control. While distributing intranet ownership has many benefits, it also means organizations need to take special care governing and managing these distributed sites.

Many intranets fail because they become content dumping grounds, and you want joint responsibility to keep the platform in order.

Again, major challenges should be brought to the governance committee. The central internal communications or intranet administrator team typically works with all of the site managers directly and brings strategic discussions back to the broader Governance Committee. Read through our governance blog series and learn how to set up your governance committee successfully to avoid intranet failure:.

What do you do? In accordance with our privacy policy , we'll only use your information to contact you about Simpplr's relevant content and solutions. Unsubscribe anytime. All posts Intranet Governance Series: Managing a federated intranet with multiple managers and content contributors Part 4. Written by Simpplr Research. Category Governance.