Introduction

Any decision we make, in business or in our life outside the office, will have a risk and a benefit. The better the quality of information we have available to us, the more likely that the trade-off between risk and benefit will be to our advantage. Governance, a very over-used buzz-word of the past decade, is about putting in place procedures to ensure that the people making decisions:

Governance is therefore concerned with:

Whenever two or three intranet managers gather together, the subject of the conversation soon turns to governance issues, and in particular the ‘governance structure’ of each other's intranet.1 When intranets fail to meet business and user requirements it is rarely due to a problem with the technology or to incompetence on the part of the intranet manager. They fail because decisions need to be made but no one seems to have either the authority to make them or the vision to understand the impact that either the optimum decision or no decision at all will have on the organization. When I undertake intranet consulting assignments one of my conditions of engagement is that I will have access to either the CEO (if the organization is reasonably small) or a member of the senior management team. My reason is not only to get a top-down view of what they see as the objectives for the intranet, but also to find out who they think is responsible for making decisions about how to achieve these objectives. I have regularly come across situations where senior managers are not sure who ‘owns’ the intranet.