[thelist] Intranet cms recommendations [OT] busines v/s technical requirements

[Paul Bennett]

Hi Will,

Good point. The reason for this is that our intranet content development will be centralised, as opposed to decentralised, so, while consultation has been undertaken with the organisation, the long-term responsibility for editing, maintenance and development lies with my team.

How does this impact on business requirements?
Our intranet in the past has become simply a dumping ground for everyone's rubbish or the repository for everyone's bright ideas. We've come to firmly believe that just because anyone can enter content, it doesn't mean they should. Unstructured user-contributed content tends to become jargonistic, business unit centric and structurally out-of-control pretty fast.

To avoid this, my team have been given the all-clear to be 'gatekeepers' for content and intranet extension. While users may draft new pages or edit existing pages, all changes will be ratified by a central editor / writer and structural changes will be ratified by a manger / IA
This means we need to specify less of "the intranet cms must enable users to..." and more of "the intranet cms must not be a pain in the rear for us to live with for the next 5 - 8 years".

In that sense our intranet will be more similar to a traditional website ("I need to find information") than to a collaboration tool ("I need to share this with everyone/ Jim/ Bob/ Sue") like SharePoint enables.
We have other collaboration tools which can be rolled out on an as-needed basis.

Does that answer your question?

Regards,
Paul