Governing the intranet inside and "outside" - Intranet Governance 2.0

At an IBF Member service review meeting this week, I listened to a discussion about whether it was "better or worse" to enable or prevent staff from using social software sites on the internet. One IBF Member talked about a useful document from the Trades Union Council in the UK about good practice in this area. Interesting debate but what does this really mean?

It strikes me that we are actually talking about is governance across three different online services:

• The traditional/formal intranet
• The less formal and flexible intranet including web 2.0 applications
• The "intranet outside" including staff use of services such as Facebook

Thanks go to Richard Dennison from BT for the third area of the "intranet outside" and it is intriguing to view all three facilities as part of the tool set that employees use in their work and all three require some and different levels of governance.

The issue is not about banning the use of social software sites but understanding that they are effectively becoming part of the intranet landscape of the organisation and while available for us they do need to governed as part of the employer-employee relationship.

Let's say our traditional intranet requires strictest governance: health and safety policy and HR self service needs to be correct and verifiable. The less formal "under web" can be more relaxed but still requires governance for meeting coporate standards and leaglity. The third area of intranets outside must meet standards of corporate reputation and brand/confidentiality/data security etc.

This is about appropriate governance across all intranet manifestations and that will allow organisations to include new internet based services - as well as new internal apps that arrive from the internet as blogs have done. Hopefully food for thought......

Comments

[Ross Chestney]

I think the days of the 'formal/official' intranet may be numbered - in the same way as the organisational boundaries are being broken down. All content is now collaborative and could be hosted anywhere - inside or outside. As Intranet managers we need to be more radical in our thinking about how the governance frameworks will work in the future. Richard Dennison discusses this on his blog [http://richarddennison.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/changing-nature-of-intranet-content/], as do I [http://rosschestney.blogspot.com/]