Intranet Strategy ; the intranet manager's challenge

As part of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum's research programme they have just published a detailed research report for it's members on the challenges of managing intranet strategy and governance, written by me and John Baptista.

Following a survey of nearly 70 large organisations, and analysing the benchmarking data IBF has from all it's Global members, we summarised the potential challenges faced by intranet managers in this area - the 'vicious circle' of intranet management (click on the image below for a larger version)

Even though most of the organisations we analysed have a developing intranet or portal supporting key business processes, we found that in most organisations here is often a lack of understanding about the strategic importance of the organisation's intranet.

This often means that senior leaders struggle to see why they should be involved with intranet development, and leads to little or no obvious senior level support.

Jane McConnell also recently discussed this trend in her blog post What keeps senior management awake at night and predicts this is an area won't have changed much in the near future.

If no one senior leader champions the intranet, other senior leaders also may not see the need to be that involved, and if senior leaders are not energised by the intranet, those underneath them will not be either - leading to a general lack of involvement in strategy development from the wider business.  The lack of senior involvement also reduces the prospect of developing an effective steering committee. 

Without this process to ensure input from all areas of the business, local units who DO want to develop the intranet to support their business processes find there is often no formal route to ensure the group wide intranet supports their developing needs. Local units then start developing their own local plan to serve their needs.  Whilst this works locally it can cause problems for the wider intranet plan....

More on this tomorrow.

Comments

[Stephan Schillerwein]

Great chart, Helen! Simple, yet a clear illustration of some of the biggest problems in intranet management and their interconnectedness.

From my experience the best (maybe even only?) point to break out of this vicious circle is at the top: really anchoring the intranet into the organisation when a major rework of the intranet is being undertaken by getting the "right" people on board and addressing the "right" topics.

Therefore the company has to be very aware about what future intranet management issues can (and will) typically arise and how they can be addressed in the initial phases of the project, i.e. esp. in the setup (or "update") of the intranet strategy.
Later on in the project (or intranet lifecycle) it is often not possible to direct the required (management) attention to this themes, anymore.

I've just recently finished a series of seminars on intranet management with some dozen participants and have (regrettably, but not surprisingly) found only faint traces of this awareness.
Let's hope your latest report will help to change this situation a little bit.

Stephan