Who is Responsible For Your Intranet?

As anyone who has ever been responsible for an intranet knows, well used, effective intranets take more than just installing great intranet software. The best intranets are the ones whose objective is aligned to the objective of the business. Intranet governance plays a large role in this, helping to align the vision of senior management with the day to day responsibilities of this tool. Download our Guide to Intranet Governance, for more information.

Within this blog I’m going to be discussing the responsibility assignment matrix (also known as the RACI matrix) so that you can show the business who is responsible for what on your intranet. 

As a business tool, the intranet has many stakeholders. It affects many people on many different levels. For day to day intranet governance there needs to be a way to clearly show people who is responsible for your intranet. Step in the RACI matrix. 

The matrix is made up of a grid with a list of intranet tasks in the left column and the key roles in the row above the grid. It seeks to show who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed when each action is taken. 

• Responsibility is for implementing the task, who is going to be making sure this gets done.
• Accountable is the person ultimately responsible for this task to be achieved on your intranet. They may assign the work to others but they alone are accountable.
• Consulted is those whose opinions are sought before the task is carried out (typically subject matter experts).
• Informed defines those that are kept up to date on the progress of the task and don’t need to be consulted.

The matrix is a great tool to quickly and clearly see who is responsible for your intranet. Every action has one accountable owner who is ultimately responsible for the task to be completed. Tasks can be one off but most of the time detail the actions that happen on a regular basis. 

Actions need to be at all levels, from senior sponsor to intranet management as well as any business contributors. Depending on how complex your intranet is you may have more or less roles than I have shown here. 

We have loads more information, including detail on intranet steering committees, best practice and intranet management in our downloadable intranet governance guide.