Policies and Guidelines: Rules of the Road for an Intranet
By Susan Wiener and Kim A. Hanson
Companies that have been using intranets in their daily business
practices over the last two years are finding out what works and, more important, what
doesn’t. And what doesn’t work is forgetting business objectives and not having
policies and guidelines.
At Cognitive Communications, an intranet strategy and application
development firm based in New York City, one key issue we provide counsel for is
establishing these rules of the road, policies and guidelines for intranets.
Intranets are agents of change. Once companies have established the
reasons why they want to affect change using an intranet (strategy development), the next
critical step is creating parameters for making that change happen. These parameters --
communicated to users as policies and guidelines -- are crucial to a company’s
intranet, not only to get it off the ground, but also to keep it in line with the
site’s strategy and the company’s business objectives.
Companies that develop intranet sites without any initial guidelines
and overarching strategies are now finding that employees don’t know how to interact
with this new work tool. Without a structure to define behavior surrounding the intranet,
employees lack the basic tools to understand how the site can be useful to them or how to
contribute their ideas.
Lessons Learned
One client of Cognitive Communications was an early adopter of
intranet technology. This hi-tech company eagerly embraced their intranet project and saw
it as an ideal vehicle for fostering its open culture of sharing and learning. After six
months of planning and strategizing, this company launched an intranet. There were no
guidelines with regard to content or contributing, allowing anyone to publish content
wherever and whenever they wanted -- with no regard to file size, navigational scheme or
how the content fit into the site’s overall strategy,
Three years later, this company is re-thinking this policy and
realizing the necessity of establishing rules, such as a guideline for publishing content.
The company has realized that in order to share knowledge among their constituents and
allow them to disseminate information that is meaningful to them, they must implement
guidelines on how to categorize content, who can publish, what they can publish and where
it is located on the intranet site.
Understanding the Issues
There are many issues to consider when developing a set of polices
and guidelines for your company’s intranet. Some issues are technical (naming
conventions, for example) and some are political (who funds content on an intranet). At
Cognitive, we have identified over 20 main issues including: access, confidentiality and
privacy, content and contributing, feedback, and linking.
What type of guidelines your company develops around these issues
will depend on your company’s culture, business objectives and the strategy for your
site. As you develop these rules of the road, keep in mind that intranets should be used
to create open rooms, places to share information, and not private spaces. Remember that
your intranet should reflect the company’s culture, but not mirror its
hierarchical structure.
Content and Contributing
Companies face many issues when considering rules for employee
contributions to the intranet. Criteria and appropriateness of content need to be
identified and defined. Will departments, and individual employees, be allowed to develop
their own sites? Will personal home pages be allowed? Where will the funding for intranet
content come from?
Rules for contributing also need to be addressed. Who can
contribute? What will be the procedures, the process for contribution? Who decides on
links to the corporate home page? Who decides on which links, overall, are appropriate?
By the People, For the People
To help find answers to some of these critical questions and to help
guide the intranet project itself, many companies create a guidelines steering committee,
often made up of individuals from one or more sponsoring departments, such as Corporate
Communications, Human Resources, Sales, Marketing and the Information Technology group. By
establishing key contacts in a cross-section of departments, there is more assurance that
the intranet will be well represented organizationally and ultimately, more effective. In
addition, a collaborative approach to developing guidelines is necessary since one
guideline will ultimately affect another.
Finally, keep in mind that as your corporation and employees gain
more intranet experience -- and, as your site expands and grow -- you will want to revisit
your policy and guidelines often for refinement and possible revisions.
About the authors:
Susan Wiener is a Principal and Co-founder of Cognitive Communications. Kim Hanson, ABC, is a Senior Associate, Communications.
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