Editorial
I'm a guy who loves analogies. They’re a great way to quickly explain something complex in simpler terms. And since they’re not expected to be a perfect parallel to a given subject, they offer flexibility in conversations.
When talking about intranets and employee tools, my favorite analogy is that of a house or building. Once understood, we can build on this analogy to address the digital workplace overall, and more easily parse out management responsibilities, or what we frequently call “ownership” in an enterprise setting.
Let’s start with the fun part.
The Intranet as a House or Building
A house or building contains all sorts of “stuff,” just like our intranet, organized into rooms (Groups or Pages) based on some common theme across the “stuff.” Most of us keep hygiene and personal grooming products in the bathroom, our clothes in our bedroom, cooking materials in the kitchen and so on. Similarly, in an intranet, benefits content goes in one “room,” Legal content goes in another… you see the parallels.
One reason I love this analogy is because it works on multiple levels. Within the room, we further organize our stuff just like content within an intranet. Our bedroom, for example, is where we store our clothes — whether that's on the floor or in our closet. And we choose whether to organize our clothes according to color, outfit, or by clothing type, like pants, shirts or sweaters.
Similarly, within an intranet, we bucket content together in a hierarchy of organization — Groups or Pages (like rooms), to Sub-groups, -tabs or -pages (like desks, drawers and closets), and finally in Sections (like drawer organizers).
Drafting a Proper Blueprint
Just like in a home or building, there's no right or wrong way to do things. Sure, there are standards, but there’s an exception for every rule. For example, you might think a sink only goes in a bathroom until you design a doctor’s office.
Now consider the more complex aspects of our building that need to be thought out in advance:
- Where do we need plumbing, and where should it come through the wall or floor?
- Where do we need electrical outlets?
- Where should the doors and windows go?
- What shape should the foundation be?
These decisions are important for obvious reasons. Like a concrete foundation, once they’re set in place, they’re not easy or cheap to change.
In the same way, we need to be thoughtful in decisions we make about our intranet. It’s even fun to map our intranet decision with our analogous building questions:
- What integrations do we need? (Plumbing)
- What data will we pull in, and where will we display it? (Where do we need electrical outlets?)
- How will users get in, and what will they see when they do? (Where should the doors and windows go?)
- Do we need to support multiple brands globally? In what languages? (Foundation)
Related Article: 8 Essential Intranet Features for 2023
Shifting Roles From IT to the Business
Another beauty of analogies is that they’re flexible. That which is impossible in reality is possible in our imaginations, and therefore we can twist reality with our analogy to represent what is possible in our analogous system.
For example, we might say that in our building we can now add, move or remove “Rooms” easily. Walls and outlets can be shifted without a general contractor.
What we’re really saying is that, thanks to modern content management systems (CMSs), creating pages, sub-pages, groups, and the like in intranets is easy, and not technical. IT is no longer required to perform these functions; business users have been doing them for years.
Complex integrations from IT are also no longer necessary. All we need is an initial connection and the CMS lets us drop the sourced data just about anywhere and everywhere.
Translated to our analogy: we can now add and remove electric outlets ourselves, without an electrician once we’re connected to the electrical grid.
Business as the Building Manager, IT as the General Contractor
All of this begs the question — who manages our building?
Who knows where things need to go? Who is best positioned to understand what the residents need today, and every day, as we “live” in the building together? If we think of the intranet in this way, it’s easier to understand where responsibilities should begin and end.
In my experience, the business is usually best suited to:
- Define what Rooms exist (Groups or Pages)
- Determining how to get to a given Room (Architecture and Navigation)
- Adding and removing Rooms (Groups and Pages)
- Assigning who gets keys to what rooms (managing Permissions)
- Decorating (consulting, layouts and graphics)
- Basic repair and room maintenance (page refreshes, adding and removing Groups or Pages)
This must be done in partnership with IT, who acts as the general contractor of the building:
- Installing and repairing integrations (connection to the electrical grid)
- Adjusting data feeds (connecting to plumbing)
- Researching new technologies (innovation)
- Troubleshooting the connections above as needed
Our Digital Workplace as a Virtual Neighborhood
If we follow the logic of this analogy outward, we can imagine the intranet has one building among others, such as our HRIS system, our finance system, our expense system and so on.
The result is our Digital Workplace — a virtual neighborhood of buildings (systems), each with its own leader, design, governance and vision for the future.
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As our neighborhood grows, the need for holistic neighborhood management becomes self-evident — just like our Digital Workplace. We need clear roles for who takes the lead in decisions for each building, and we need the building managers to talk with one another.
Take our analogy even further and you can see how it can go awry: each building manager determining how and from where they're going to get electricity or plumbing, just like system managers determine whether they're going to pull data from Active Directory or HRIS. Each of us depends on data fields to be in certain places, and if others are trying to change those fields at the same time, we can simultaneously help ourselves while hurting one another.
Coordination and holistic management become essential, lest chaos take over.
Who Should Lead the Digital Workplace?
So finally, we come to the eternal question. I know this is a hot topic and I'm sure opinions run the gamut.
Mostly I have seen digital workplace titles listed under IT organizations. For one, I suspect that their definition of digital workplace may differ from mine. I’ve seen plenty of such titles describing technical professionals who manage service desks, for example.
For a deep dive into this discussion, I recommend Michelle Hawley’s Reworked article “What is a Digital Workplace? Definition, Benefits, Best Practices.” In it, she quotes Digital Workplace experts such as Sam Marshall, Rachel Happe, and Nancy Goebel, all of whom advocate for a digital workplace definition that includes the employee experience, technology and usability, in some form or another.
This is why I have become a strong advocate for the business (and often communications, specifically) to lead digital workplace strategies.
I realize this may ruffle some feathers.
I’ve met plenty of IT professionals who disagree and believe IT can and should play the business-consulting role. As I said about building designs, one size does not fit all, and I certainly have not seen every circumstance, so I’m open to being corrected.
That said, in my experience, when budgets get tight and IT is pressed for resources, they are ultimately expected to focus on making sure technologies work. The plumbing and electrical connections become paramount, and the aesthetics of our building (i.e. usability and employee experience) become secondary, or worse.
This is not a criticism of IT any more than it would be a criticism of the business to suggest their people aren’t experts in technology. Each of us has a unique set of strengths, and that's the point of different organizations. Where this becomes a problem is when we ask teams to do work outside of their expertise. I believe that's what we've done to our IT colleagues for far too long.
In the end, leading the digital workplace must be a partnership. No one team can manage it all on their own — a wide range of cross-functional perspectives is far superior to one myopic view.
Yet we still need to draw lines, for all our sakes, to make decisions and drive progress.
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