Devolved publishing models

Most companies use a devolved publishing model for their intranet content. But does it actually work? Do we end up with good content?

In the company I work for we also use devolved publishing. And we have an ongoing publisher engagement programme in which we try very hard to upskill our publishers and keep them up to date with new developments in the world of the web. But the reality is that our publishers all have a day job - and that's not their publishing role. This is just a small part of it. So are we expecting too much from them?

We have about 300 publishers in the company of roughly 11,000 employees. We have good uptake on our lunch and learn events and we frequently receive positive feedback form our publisher e-zine. So people are definitely interested in improving their content, but we see little evidence that this actually happens on the intranet.

When employees initially approach us to become a publisher we ask them and their line manager to sign up to the publisher agreement. But the manager needs to understand that writing good content measn that the employee needs to spend some time on this task.

Is the devolved publishing model just a method of ignoring the fact that good content is created by trained writers, and employing them costs money? Money which organisation don't want to, or can't, invest in their intranets.

As Gerry McGovern says - Spend ten minutes on your content and the user will need one hour to decipher it. But spend one hour writing your content and the user will need ten minutes to read it.

Fantastic! Now we just need to roll this thinking out to our time poor publishers...

Private vs public sector intranets - a great divide?

"Intranets in the private sector are always better because they have more money."

Over the last eight years or so I have worked for various private companies and Government departments. While working in the public sector my colleagues always told me that we shouldn't compare Government intranets with those in the private sector because 'they have loads of money to spend on making their intranets the best'.

I used to take this at face value. But in my opnion this is actually not a valid point, in fact the opposite is often true.

Government teams generally have an allocated annual budget and if a new department wide project is launched they apply to a central pot to funding. It just doesn't work that way in the private sector. Teams submit their project plans for the following year and if they are approved funding is provided. There is simply no option to add on new projects after this point, and if projects are delayed budget is often moved to other teams who have shortfalls.

In summary, it's not all about money. You can't just throw money at an intranet to make it good. But do this and you're on to a winner (in no particular order):

• Good content
• Strong governance
• Supportive senior management
• Innovative intranet team
• In house developer(s)