During an informal visit to one of our community of practice members in Copenhagen, I met with an intranet manager. He wondered why the web team did not want to collaborate with his team. It seems to him as if the web team have absolutely no interest in the intranet and his intranet projects, despite of the fact that the two teams, in his view, share so many similar challenges.
If you have separate web and intranet teams in your organisation today, I recommend that you consider merging them. I’ve seen this work well in many organizations. Typically the combined unit resides in the communication department. If you have a combined team, perhaps lead by a Head of Online Media or directly by the Communications Director, you can better define and outline the right flow for online projects, activities and stories. You can also make better use of your resources and assign them to work on with the most appropriate and relevant projects in relation to the organisational priorities, instead of having a committed intranet team following one direction, while the web team wanders off in another direction, while trying to solve the exact same problems.
When something really important occurs and you need to react fast to get the story communicated well on your website, it makes sense for the intranet team members to assist and help. The same goes when you need to roll out a new intranet, where you could make good use of the skills that reside in the web team.
During the recent boom years, some experts have been busy writing about how intranets are unique and need special treatment, additional budget and its own set of strategies and processes. There are indeed different audiences and requirements, but by simply working together you can achieve better results. Your intranet is essential and so is your website. Successfully cracking how you make better use of information across your online brands is the key to find a real competitive advantage.
Join our full day seminar, the International Intranet Day, on March 24 in Copenhagen, to learn from case studies from several organisations and network with other intranet professionals.
Brian Kaupa January 25th, 2009 20:43
Nice post. This arrangement can also offer the following added benefits:
* cost reductions by leveraging some of the same infrastructure (app servers, web servers, firewalls, etc…)
* ability to conduct smaller scale tests of new functionality before showing them to the world (i.e. allow the intranet to be the ‘test bed’ for new technologies/widgets)
* developer bench strength