Building an Intranet content management strategy
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/03055720010804113 |
| Pages | 20-26 |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| Author | Luke Tredinnick |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
20 — VINE 124
Building an Intranet
content management
strategy
by Luke Tredinnick, Baker Tilly
A step-by-step guide to the principals of
creating content management proces ses and
resources for Intranets , this article cov ers the
creation of aims and objectives for Intranets,
information mana gement issues specific to
Intranets, and how to turn those objectives
and issues into working content managem ent
procedures.
Intranets: managing the
unmanageable
Intranet content management is an issue more
often discussed than implemented. Good content
management is simply the allocation of resources
and processes to ensure that the right information
is availa ble, eas y to lo cate, and easy to access,
while the wrong information remains absent. The
key difference between managing an Intranet and
any other large information resource is that the
collation, collection, organisation and maintenance
of information on an Intranet is often decentral-
ised, and responsibilities for that collation,
collection, organisation and maintenance of infor-
mation dispersed across an organisation. The
challenge of Content Management therefore is not
so much in identifying new characteristics of
information unique to Intranets, but in developing
processes to manage a resource that is maintained,
developed and updated in a disparate and multi-
skilled way.
Gupta and Wachter identify four management
styles that can be applied to Intranets1:
Laissez-faire
Or the decentralised model, where
contribu tors of Intranet content are free to
publish any information they deem
appropriate, with little or no bureaucracy.
Centrali sed model
Where policies and procedures for Intranet
management are formulated and
implemented to control development.
Mixed model
Where policies and pro cedures are drawn up
and passed down through an organisation,
but where the contributors have
responsibility to publish within these
policies and procedures with little or no
centralised control.
Supp ort services mo del
Where the organisation provides support for
Intranet contributors through the
development process.
In practice, many corporate Intranets progress
through a series of management stages, starting as
unmanaged collections of information often
relying on the enthusiasm of key individuals, and
becoming progressively more managed as they
grow and diversify. The crisis point triggering the
implementation of a full content management
strategy for many organisations is the realisation
that their Intranets are not only unmanaged, but
also unmanageable. As unmanaged Intranets grow,
both recall an d precision in information retrieval
drop, making users feel not only that information is
difficult to find, but also irrelevant to their needs.
The process of building an Intranet content man-
agement strategy can be divided into three stages,
starting with the formulation of policy, through
planning to implementation.
Stage One: What use are
Intranets? – Applications and
results
Stage one is to define the role of the Intranet
within the organisation. The role of the Intranet
can be thought of in terms of applications and
results, where applications are those uses to which
an Intran et is pu t, and results the impact of those
applications on the activities of the organisation.
Intranet development is invariably discussed solely
in terms of results, both within organisations and
in the literature. We may hear about Intranets
enabling a sharing culture, or releasing an organi-
sation’s intellectual and knowledge capital.
However it is always a mistake to attempt to define
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