Article

November 6, 2024

What is intranet governance and why should I care?

Claire Flanagan

7 minute read

Experts agree that an intranet or digital workplace initiative is less about the technology itself and more about the leadership of the program to drive the change expected.

Intranet governance is a set of structures and processes for decision making and accountability. We believe this matters to you because when governance is applied well it can:

Drive buy-in and adoption at all levels of the organization
Help you structure norms, rules, how decisions get made, and ways of working
Help employees understand and adopt new ways of working that can have far-reaching business value and impact across the organization, and
Ensure both organizational and employee goals are met

At LumApps, we approach intranet governance from two perspectives - both the organizational perspective (how do we make sure that organization objectives are met) and the employee perspective (how do we ensure that employees get value out of the solution).

Organizational Goals	Employee Goals
How does this meet our organization objectives? How do we coordinate implementation across the business? What do we do with legacy systems & resources? Who will lead the change? How do we get everyone on board? What does success look like?	Do I have to do it this new way? Why are we making this change? What’s in it for me? How does this impact or benefit my work? Who do I reach out to with my questions? How can I get involved & share my work? What is the current project status?

We also see evidence across our most successful customers where a good governance program can help mitigate common risks involved with launching a new technology project and ensures the program:

Stays on budget
Meets business goals
Addresses and mitigates employee resistance to change
Secures top down and cross-functional input and buy-in

Intranet ROI

Thinking about a new intranet platform? This free whitepaper explains the potential impact of an intranet and how to track ROI.

Research shows that intranet programs with strong leadership have seen the following outcomes:

77% can tie program outcomes to improved efficiency
64% have positively impacted culture
52% can show increased speed of innovation

All intranets must align with business objectives and comply with key policies and processes so it’s important to manage your intranet like a program.

How? Tie the program to strategic objectives, define what success looks like, and ensure key roles are resourced and stakeholders are involved. It’s also important to identify executive sponsors and change agents who can drive change from the top down and from the bottom up as well.

However, the biggest risk to adopting a new intranet is the employee’s resistance to change. When creating a governance plan, the team leading the program should think about how to involve employees in the change and be as transparent as possible. Employees need to know why the company is making the change and, most importantly, what’s in it for them to adopt the change.

We often find that intranet programs that focus on change management, and involving employees in the change plans, are often more successful. It’s important to communicate widely – in both synchronous and asynchronous ways – to ensure all employees understand and have a voice in what’s happening and their role in it. Doing so can have the biggest impact since employees understand why they should use the new system and how it benefits them.

A good governance plan covers three main areas:

Policies & Key Processes. This ensures compliance and provides guidance for internal processes and decision-making.
Roles & Responsibilities. This ensures the program has the right roles staffed at the right program milestones to ensure success.
Stakeholder Engagement & Decisions. This ensures the program has rituals in place with the right stakeholders to align objectives, seek feedback, approve budgets and make decisions.

The graphic below sums up these three main areas and examples that the program should address for each governance topic.

an intranet governance plan covers policies and processes, roles and responsibilities, and stakeholder engagement

Before addressing key roles, types of roles, and structure - it’s important to think about two big best practice tips.

Tip #1: Think like a program. Make sure your intranet is run like a program. It’s no longer true that if you build it they will come. Intranets are more and more driven by bottom up efforts with a heightened set of expectations both from the business and from employees. Instead, intranet teams need to focus on program management best practices like: securing executive sponsorship, establishing and securing budget and resource approvals, securing input and buy-in on the program strategy & roadmap, documenting key processes and policies for the new system and executing on change management plans to help employees and leaders exhibit new ways of working and engaging.

Tip #2: Don’t forget the role of leaders. The role of leaders in the organization, and even the intranet program leadership, play an important role in driving the necessary change in the organization.

Leaders can be important role models for new ways of working and leveraging your modern intranet tools to both communicate with and engage employees. Often they can influence other leaders and employees to join in - not by telling employees what to do but by showing new behaviors for sharing and engaging.

However, intranet program leaders also need to build their leadership and influence skills. The most successful intranet program leaders know the importance of finding key stakeholders across the organization, both at executive and operational levels, and establishing the right committees to secure both their strategic and operational program feedback and their buy-in on the program roadmap. These program leaders also know how to inspire senior leaders with examples for them to engage and try new ways of leading transparently.

Where do I start?

It can be daunting to figure out how to put the right governance model or roles in place. But it’s important to:

Start small, take a simple approach
Build important relationships you need
Leverage cross-functional relationships and distributed roles to help you get work done

Before we dive into the specific roles you will need - we should talk about a few “types of roles”.

main types of roles for intranet governance include core team staff and funded, distributed, volunteer

1. Core team - Staffed & Funded

There are some roles that are so critical to the program launch and ongoing success that they must be funded either part-time or in full-time roles. Those roles should have the ultimate accountability for business or technical success and typically show up on the program budget. You can have one person playing multiple roles, but someone should be identified for these key roles.

Potential titles include: business or program owners, enterprise community manager, technical product owner, system administrator

2. Distributed Roles

Additionally, there are distributed roles that might actually report in through various functional business units. They're not part of the core team, but they have a vested interest in the success of the program and they probably participate or contribute to the intranet in a formal way. Often these roles may need official training.

One example is an HR lead who is responsible for creating and maintaining the content, either for an HR landing page, HR news, or may be leading employee resource groups or communities. They have functional, and vested, interest in the success of the program, but they may not formally report to the core intranet team. These are resources that are important to engage and we’ll discuss how to leverage these individuals in program feedback and decision making later in this article.

Potential titles include: content authors, landing page owners, business unit owners, site owners, community managers, steering committee members, working group members, business unit or functional leads

3. Volunteer Roles

Finally, you have what we like to call volunteer roles - these are individuals across the organization who may provide deeper program support above and beyond their typical day job and who model important new behaviors or help advocate for the program, new ways of working or even take the extra effort to train their peers.

These individuals may be content owners, community managers, executive bloggers . . . but they are emerging as leaders and champions for your intranet program. They may be answering questions or they may be running lunch-and-learns or they may take initiative to share their own tips or best practices with others in your organization. We’ll talk more about these roles as well and how they help your program.

Potential titles include: advocates & champions, train the trainers (These individuals could have varying “formal” titles in your organization - but they are playing the role of “advocate or champion” because they are modeling behavior you want others to see for either “peer to peer” engagement or “leadership/executive” engagement.)

It’s also important to set up your program to address how decisions get made. There are three tiers we like to focus on when it comes to making decisions about the intranet.

1. Strategic decision making

At the strategic layer - you are focused on aligning the program to corporate objectives and engaging the right stakeholders and sponsors to validate your objectives, ensure your strategic plans are sound, budgets are approved and resources are assigned.

Focus on this layer of decision making ensures your intranet program delivers strategic value to organization and that you have executive level sponsorship who will help align your intranet program to corporate objectives, advocate on behalf of your program to their peer executives and ensure decisions are made or roadblocks are cleared to ensure success.

2. Operational decision making

At the operational level - you are focused on ensuring stakeholder feedback from all levels of the organization is used to shape your intranet program’s business & technical priorities and that plans are put in place to both grow adoption and engagement or close gaps identified.

At this level you’re seeking input from content owners, members, leaders, cross-functional business unit leaders as well as sponsors. You’re looking for clues about what’s working well, what could be done differently and what new use cases (content sections, services, capabilities) should be added to your program. And you’re building revised roadmap plans and recommendations to accelerate what’s working or close the gaps identified to secure buy-in and support from other key stakeholders.

3. Tactical decision making

At the tactical level, you're focused on day-to-day activities and implementation. You are executing against your roadmap or against your plans.

You are running those change and training programs, onboarding new use cases, implementing new features or integrations, sending out the communications you’ve planned, making UX changes as needed, providing member support, and running your working groups or champion programs.

At this point, you are also evaluating how to grow value for members and for the organization. In the course of your day-to-day activities you are hearing from real members (authors, visitors, community managers, site owners) where they are struggling or where they see opportunities. You are capturing this information to bring back to your working groups for discussion and future planning.

So with that said, now let's take a look at the main roles that are required to make this all happen.

Intranet ROI

Thinking about a new intranet platform? This free whitepaper explains the potential impact of an intranet and how to track ROI.

Each team will look a bit different based on company size and resources, but there are 3 types of roles that we recommend for intranet governance success.

You can have one person playing multiple roles, but at a fundamental level, we need to make sure there's focus on program success both from a business and technical perspective.

1. Executive sponsor (Strategic Alignment & Success)

This individual is responsible for strategic alignment. They're helping you look at an executive level and making sure your program is tied to strategic business objectives that matter. They're also advocating among their executive peer group about the program, the goals of the program, and successes. And they're helping you clear blockers or get your strategy refined and budget/resources approved to help you be successful.

Common job titles for this role are chief human resources officers, chief communication officers, chief information officer, or chief knowledge officer. Typically the sponsorship is based from the main function where the most critical business need is identified and where that sponsor can tie the impact to strategic imperatives and even have the influence to impact budgets and resources.

2. Program Ownership (Business Success, Adoption & Engagement)

The Business Program owner is responsible for developing the strategies, making the business case, securing sponsorship, enlisting cross-functional support for the strategies and as well as implementing both governance groups and change programs to drive adoption.

You need at least one person focused on business success. As Gartner suggests you should have someone “who identifies the desired business outcomes, develops the business case and establishes the measures by which success is determined.” This person is responsible for developing the strategies, making the business case, securing sponsorship, and enlisting cross-functional support for both the strategies and as well as plan execution.

Depending on the size or maturity of your program you may have one or both of these business roles below. If there is only one person focused on business success, then that single individual is responsible for filling both business roles described below.

Business Program Owner (Strategic/Operational)
* Depending on your culture this role could also be known as Business Owner, Program Manager, Program Owner, Intranet Business Owner

Overall business accountability for the program including strategy, governance, policies, leadership and helping to integrate programs into organizational work practices
Responsible for change management, communications, measurement, adoption, branding, moderation, customization business requirements, content objectives, and roadmap execution
Positions the program among other enterprise initiatives and forges strong partnerships with executives, and other cross-functional stakeholders
Defines success metrics and share program scorecard including qualitative and quantitative data
Identifies issues and builds roadmap and recommendations Sponsor decision/approval
Leads Steering Committee, Working Group.
Manages Enterprise Community Manager (ECM)

Intranet Manager (Operational/Tactical)
* Depending on your culture this role could also be known as Digital Workplace Manager or Enterprise Community Manager

Own day-to-day operations to improve adoption, engagement
Implements roadmap plans like: change programs, communication & newsletter campaigns, member/author training and support, new feature testing, office hours, and help documentation
Acts as the “go-to” person for on-boarding. Provides training and best practices to content sites owners, new use case owners, content owners or community managers
Owns homepage, global navigation, and curation of global news / features
Benchmarks best practices with industry peers
Own overall content health (content & community audits), information architecture, taxonomy (adding tags, editing labels/metadata, or navigation)
Leads Champion/Advocate groups

3. Technical Ownership (Technical Success)

Additionally, make sure you have someone focused on technical success. This person will own all technical aspects such as the identity provider, integrations with other elements in their stack, consult with the business on proper test and change control processes, and technical integrations post-launch.

They need to partner with the business and with the steering committee to understand the roadmap, how the business requirements are evolving, and what opportunities there are to adopt new integrations or even maintain existing integrations.

Fundamentally, you should at least have one person that fills either multiple business roles or multiple technical roles.

Technology / Product Owner

Depending on your culture could as be: Product Owner, System Administrator, Global Admin
Owns evaluating and decision on technical decisions to meet objectives: integrations, customizations, themes, upgrades, technical change control
Provides direction to System Administrator, Support team

System Administrator

Depending on your culture could as be: System Administrator, Global Admin, Support Team
Manages day-to-day technical aspects of digital workplace (integrations, themes, upgrades, technical change control)
Owns testing and enabling: new feature flags, configurations or new integrations
Owns enablement of support desk, acts as Tier 2 (SME) for support desk
Ensures the technical health of the digital workplace

It’s important to get cross functional engagement, feedback and buy in to your program. There are several important committees or groups you need to establish and engage to get feedback, help make decisions, or get work done.

1. Steering Committee

The steering committee is a governing body that will help make sure that your program continues to be aligned with business objectives and will provide direction and resources to optimize program success.

Leverage this group to:

Align program to business objectives
Review & approve your recommendations for roadmap priorities to add new capabilities or close gaps
Help secure resources or clear blockers

How often should this committee meet?
Be sure to establish a regular cadence for this group to meet, quarterly is typically recommended.

Who makes up this committee?
Of course you need at least 3 core roles (*) but you also want to recruit and engage other cross-functional executives who will likely have a vested interest in the success of your program.

Executive Sponsor*
Business Owner / Program Owner*
Technical Platform Owner*
Executive leaders from business units or top priority use cases: communications, human resources, product, sales, marketing, information technology, operations, plant owners, etc.

Note: For smaller programs you may not have a formal steering committee in place. But it’s always a great practice to get one started. It’s ok to start small with a few engaged leaders and expand involvement as your use cases grow.

2. The Working Group

The Working Group is a committee or group that can provide both operational support to your program as well as advice and recommendations for steering committee approval.

Leverage this group to:

Seek their input and feedback
Seek their advice on issues and actions to close gap
Review progress, metrics & KPIs
Prioritize roadmap plans
Provide support in implementing decisions across the business

How often should this group meet?
Again it’s important to establish a regular cadence for this group to meet, monthly is typically recommended. Consider more frequent meetings when needed for example if there is a campaign running and reviewing progress is time-sensitive (i.e. feedback campaign, new use strategic use case launch) or if there are planned new releases (features, integrations) that need more input, testing, or quick review cycles.

Who makes up this committee?
Of course you need at least 3 core roles (*) but you will also want to include your top content creators, landing page owners, business unit content owners, and community leaders. These individuals will have a vested interest in program success as they get feedback from their employees and use the platform on a regular basis.

Business Owner / Program Owner*
Enterprise Community Manager (aka Digital Workplace Manager, Intranet Manager)*
Technical Platform Owner*
Global & Site Admins*
Data / Analytics owners
Change Management (individuals with communications, change management or training focus to provide member communications, help content)
Content Owners (content authors, landing page owners, “site”/use case owners) from business units or top priority use cases: communications, human resources, product, sales, marketing, information technology, operations, plant owners, etc.
Community Managers from across the organization: employee resource groups, communities of practice, communities of interest, knowledge communities, other top performing or highly engaged community leaders

It’s ok to cast a wide net at the beginning. Your top engaged working group members will join when they can, supporting you in getting real work done synchronously or asynchronously. And over time new leaders will emerge that you can invite as well.

3. Champion Group

A champion group (aka advocate group) is a group of highly engaged members who volunteer their time to promote and evangelize your program among their peers and colleagues.

Leverage this group to help scale the work of your program and:

Advocate & role model best practices
Provide peer support, answers & training
Review plans, share feedback
Be early release adopters or testers
Promote or spread the word about how to use, best practices

How often should this group meet?
Again it’s important to establish a regular cadence for this group to meet, monthly is typically recommended. Consider more frequent meetings when needed for example if there is a campaign running and reviewing progress is time-sensitive (for example beta testing features or integrations).

Use this time to give these champions the tools they need to be better at what they're doing already. And be sure to invite these champions to use meeting times to “show & tell” what they’ve done, ask for help on a particular topic, inspire and support each other.

Who makes up this group?
These are members who typically emerge over time as leaders, “power users”, or individuals who are naturally providing peer to peer support, providing answers, or running local lunch-and-learn events - ultimately helping you scale the work of your program.

To get started here’s a suggestion for recruitment:

Start with official roles (i.e. content owners, top engagement community managers)
Use your reports to find who is in several type of leaderboards (i.e. top commenters, likers, or “helpers” in your help center)
Bring in anyone who self-identifies later

Again, it’s ok to cast a wide net at first. Not everyone will have the time to be highly engaged in all ways. But you will notice where individuals have strengths or desires to help out!

To wrap it all up…

If you're a team of one or even a team of three, all of this work might seem daunting. But, I guarantee that if you start setting up some of these relationships and processes with these groups, in the long run, you can get a lot more work done.

At the end of the day, the most important thing about these groups is that you create a team and process that makes sense for your company. Listen to their feedback and enlist their help in taking ownership for certain initiatives.

Want to learn more about intranet governance? Watch our webinar or book a demo to see how LumApps can help.

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