The problem with many organisations is their difficulty seeing the benefits of publishing standards and why they are needed. I will remove the barriers by showing the benefits from each publishing standard in my next few posts starting with content ownership. Publishing standards aim to:
- Improve the overall user experience
- Make people using your intranet more satisfied with it
- Improve people’s productivity
- Benefit your organisation
- Improve people’s quality of work
If you want people to use your intranet and value how it helps with their work they need to be confident the information they use is clearly owned. You need to be able to contact an owner if there is a problem with their content quickly. People need to know who to contact if they need more information or wish to check about anything that has been published. It is vital that you manage all the information consistently and appropriately across your intranet.
Benefits
Knowing who owns each piece of content published across your intranet has three main benefits.
- People using your intranet will not be delayed trying to find out who to contact for more information. It also avoids other people being asked if they know who can help with the content with extra time wasted. Having the owner’s details linked to a directory that is automatically being updated gives people confidence they can easily contact the right person.
- For you it is also important from a governance view to have a complete picture of who owns what across your intranet. You can easily spot any gaps in ownership and take appropriate action. You can also audit all content and have a contact for any problems identified.
- Lastly your organisation can be confident it has removed the risks of intellectual property and sensitive information leaking outside of it because there isn’t any clear ownership for it. This helps reduce the risk of any damage to its brand and reputation.
Are there other benefits you have found? Please let me know.
In my next post I will cover content being reviewed and up to date.
Hi Mark, I really like this series. Regarding the importance of content ownership, I think we are seeing further evidence of this as more and more companies adopt social intranets. Social intranets, by definition, allow users to see who has authored a piece of (user generated) content and interact with both the content and the author. When users get used to this ability, I have found (though both conversation and observation) that they actually trust the user generated content over static pages with an undisclosed author. I realize this is not a scientific justification, but do think it holds some water. It may be a product of human nature, or just of our times — we tend to trust more when we have the ability to confirm, then based on blind faith alone.