So I am extremely confused on this topic. In today's business world, and in all of the business world for that matter, the concept is to provide a management platform of which you might have; chairman of the board, directors, president, CEO, CFO, CMO, CTO, CIO, CCO, VP, SVP, AVP, Department Directors, Managers, Assistant Managers, and so on. The idea being that you have decentralized management in hopes to departmentalize....thus allowing individuals with special accolades and responsibilities to own their specific "section" or "piece" of the business. In essence, this is a bicycle chain where the President or CEO might be considered the sprocket that holds everything together. The president then relies on specifically appointed individuals to maintain their links within the chain. These individuals then rely on their additional links to maintain their section of the chain. Ahh...a chain of command or management structure.
So the question I impose is this, if almost, if not all business relies on some sort of management chain model for day-to-day operations, then why do these enterprises rely on one or two departments for the overall organization of employee communication and content management. Simply stated, when it comes to an employee portal or intranet, why is it so common to rely on one voice to speak for all? As opposed to relying on each department or unit to rely solely on themselves for their own internal communications and content.
Does today's technology not allow for such an idea? It does, and it is referred to as a portal. A universal platform designed to allow "non-techs", or everyday employees, to manage and maintain their section of the enterprise. Employee portals have replaced the traditional front page and static intranet. These portals are very flexible and provided numerous organizational and collaboration tools. Just to name a few off the top of my mind; role-based access, various permission strings for decentralized content management, flexible interfaces, custom landing pages, navigation trees, banners, page templates, modules, primary and secondary business applications, document access, full text search, rich text editing, discussion boards, voting, polls, calendars, alerting, notifications, read receipt, tabbed islands, blogs, wiki's, links, access to external web pages, and so on! Did I forget to mention that you may also find portal vendors which provide extendable platforms built in languages as common as .NET. For the "non-techie" types think of it like this, you are not stuck with an off the shelve product, WYSIWYG or "what you see is what you get". Not with a portal built on an extendable platform. These products are designed to grow and morph with your entity, allowing for custom work, modifications, and applications which will help to expedite or streamline your business processes. Modern portals are designed to make the user experience much more involved and fun. A friendly user experience that if implemented correctly, will have the end-users wanting to be more involved.
After all, does the IT or Marketing department know, understand, or even care what other departments such as Operations, Human Resources, Finance, or Legal do, let alone, even need on a daily basis? Why not take the responsibility and accountability off of the IT or Marketing staff and put it where it should be. If technology allows for specific departments to maintain their section of the intranet or portal, then that is how it should be. Let Operations and the other departments take care of themselves. It only makes sense to have the people with the most knowledge of what content, communications, and materials that Operations use and need on a daily basis. You guessed it, the Operations team would know. And now if this department uses inaccurate, dated, and/or incorrect materials and information, well, then it is their fault. Not to mention that this also frees up a tremendous amount of time and resources for the one or two departments which have traditionally maintained the intranet.
So, if you are relying on a management chain structure for your enterprise to stay profitable, then why in the world are you relying on one department to be the voice for all of your internal communications, collaboration, and content management? You shouldn't.