When I started my new job and became the owner of our intranet, I immediately wrote a governance page on our intranet. Yes, maybe only three people will look through it spontaneously, but I thought it was needed. On this page, we outline what the intranet is for, compare it to other systems we use, outline who is responsible for what, where to turn for training, and more. This way, anytime an employee wonders how we run the intranet, we can point them to this page.
For me, governance is a subject that easily can become unnecessarily complex. No one wants far too long-winding governance texts. Luckily, quite a few people have already thought through the governance question, and below I list some of the resources I found helpful.
Rebecca Rodgers at Step Two and her “Creating an intranet governance guide“. Rebecca outlines what a governance plan is, advises to keep it short and distinct, and presents 8 steps that I used when outlining our governance page. It is also good to know why you should have such a guide:
[blockquote cite=”Rebecca Rodgers” type=”left, center, right”]A clear set of policies and guidelines for the intranet will support good practice, avoid confusion and ensure consistency of approach.[/blockquote]
Annika Appeltofft from Ericsson presents at Intranätverk how they succeeded in building governance around their new intranet. It is very refreshing to hear a practical example like this, compared to only reading theoretical material. She also asks us to focus less on only functionality, and look more at how the intranet is run:
[blockquote cite=”Annika Appeltoft via Intranätverk” type=”left, center, right”][…]a whole lot of time is often put on functionality issues, but that’s not necessary what makes the difference in the end. Instead, more energy should be focused on governance of the intranet – how we work with content owners, web editors etc.[/blockquote]
Ephraim Freed at the Digital Workplace Group in the Analysis of Gartner’s “8 building blocks for the digital workplace” aims at the broader picture and talks about governance for the digital workplace. It is not only needed for intranets per se, but also for the whole planning of our future work places:
[blockquote cite=”Ephraim Freed” type=”left, center, right”]Time and again at DWG we see that strong governance is critical to successful digital workplace programmes. [/blockquote]
There are of course many more sources when looking at governance, but I found the above to be a good start. Good luck!
