You can create the best intranet on paper for your organisation, but if no one has clearly defined intranet roles & responsibilities, your intranet will quickly become as chaotic as its management structure (or lack of).
An intranet needs structure, management and policies telling everyone what the intranet is there for, how staff can engage with the intranet and guidelines as to how to manage content.
When you are researching your intranet options and thinking about drafting your business case, it’s important to think ahead about the resources needed to manage your intranet and how you could assign roles and responsibilities.
Recognising employee’s contribution to the intranet is incredibly important as it sets early expectations and highlights any areas that need to be discussed. By working through your intranet’s roles and responsibilities you may highlight any additional resources that are needed and also provide an opportunity to include any additional intranet responsibilities into existing job descriptions.
Most organisations will typically assign the following intranet roles:
- Intranet Sponsor
- Intranet Manager
- IT Operations
- Content Contributors
- Content Owners
- Editors
If you have a large organisation, spread across multiple locations, you can see how important it is to assign roles and create a new intranet team to enable you to have the support you need to create an intranet that meets the needs of your organisation and also ensure the intranet continues to engage your organisation post launch.
Experience suggests that you need a senior level intranet sponsor to ensure the success of your intranet. An Intranet Sponsor’s responsibilities may include items such as monitoring the performance of the intranet against required objectives, assigning resources and budgets and even reviewing audits. Have you identified who your Intranet Sponsor could be?
Another key role is the Intranet Manager who has ultimate responsibility for managing and delivering the intranet. Will this be you? With key responsibilities including: project managing, managing good practice, identifying development opportunities and being the point of escalation it is a business critical role.
IT Operations are there to ensure the smooth running of the intranet on a daily basis. This role maybe combined with the role of Intranet Manager or it may sit with the current IT team. It’s up to you decide your initial plans for your draft business case.
Content contributors/Editors and owners can be spread throughout your organisation. Each department may need to nominate a content contributor and manager for their area. Both roles may reside with one person, again it depends on how you think it will work best for your organisation. Content contributors and owners are responsible for suggesting content, according to the intranet guidelines and managing the pages they have responsibility for.
Content editors, are usually the writers. You may decide that all of your editors should attend a training course, so they are all up to speed on how to write for the intranet.
Intranet governance is a broad area and there is a lot more to these roles than I have detailed here, but I hope it gives you a snapshot about what kind of roles you should be thinking about. If you would like to find out more about intranet governance and more about roles and responsibilities you might like to download our free governance document.
Here at SORCE we’ve experienced hundreds of intranets of all shapes and sizes and are skilled at helping uncover opportunities to improve engagement and business processes.
As intranet software and consultancy providers our software powers the intranet and extranet for hundreds of organisations. Our clients cover a wide range of sectors from finance to manufacturing, not for profit organisations (such as charities and housing associations) as well as local authorities and other public sector agencies.
