Intranet Insights

When establishing an intranet, it is important to define the roles of everyone who will touch the system or its content in any way. This will help in developing the use cases that will aid in the initial development of the system, as well as ensuring clarity for all stakeholders regarding what they can expect and what is expected of them in turn.

There are additional roles that would typically reside within your intranet team proper: UI Designer, Usability Specialist, Information Designer or Architect. I will address these in a future posting about the structure of such a team.

Not all of these roles will necessarily be needed in your organization: I hope you are able to pull out and adapt the ones that are relevant in your circumstances.

Executive sponsor

A key to your success will be enlisting the support of a member of the executive team: A decision maker who believes in, and will champion your intranet. Ideally, this individual also has authority to approve your budget, however this is not necessary. More important to have a top-level champion – even one without direct access to funding – than not to have one at all.

Business owner

If you are reading this, it might well be you! The business owner is the person accountable for the success of the intranet. By success, I mean the achievement of the measurable success factors defined in a project charter, mission statement or plan. Ideally some element of the business owner’s compensation (usually a bonus) is tied to this success.

Author

A creator of content. If you have a CMS, authors are typically the principal users of that system. Some intranets offer all employees authoring rights, while others restrict content creation to those who have received training in the mechanics of the CMS as well as in some cases the approved writing style and preferred terminology.

User

A consumer of content. Users may be segmented into ‘audiences’ that see different views of the intranet based on their department or role.

Content owner

This person gets a call if there’s a problem with a piece of content. In many organizations, the author and content owner are the same individual. The content owner is responsible for a particular section of the intranet and has final say on what content appears in that section and how it is written.

Editor

This role is something of a holdover from old ways of producing and publishing content in physical form such as magazines and newspapers. Not many companies have the headcount available to assign an editor to clean up content and bring it in line with corporate standards. Arguably this is a good thing: introducing an editorial role into the content creation process can be a bottleneck. If your upper management insists upon an editor in order to ensure only ’safe’ content is published, I recommend a dedicated resource whose bonus is tied to timely turnaround. Making content editing and approval the responsibility of busy managers with other priorities creates a substantial risk of content backlog. This will diminish credibility for your site among authors and users.

Web Producer

The web producer serves as a crucial single point of contact between the intranet team (within which I strongly recommend they reside) and content owners and authors in their own departments. Each ‘business unit’ that oversees a segment of intranet content is assigned to a web producer, who then serves as their ongoing ‘intranet business partner.’ The web producer works with stakeholders – led by the content owner – to determine content requirements and define content structures, information architecture and navigation design. The degree to which this is a technical role depends upon the structure of your organization, as well as the nature of the intranet platform and tools you’ve implemented.

Intranet Council member

An Intranet Council can be a powerful tool for managing an intranet, especially in a larger enterprise. Such a Council ideally has representation from every department in your organization and serves as the steering committee for the intranet as a whole. These representatives should all be roughly equal in terms of their level in the corporate hierarchy; otherwise the higher ranking individuals will be tempted to throw their weight around to get favourable treatment for their own departments.

Technical lead

This is the IT or IS person accountable for building, maintaining and supporting your intranet. Depending upon the size and structure of your organization, the tech lead may draw upon his/her own team of developers and other technical resources (such as DBAs, QA/testers etc.) throughout IT/IS.