Intranet Governance Is Truly a Balancing Act
Explore the key aspects of intranet governance.
The word "governance" is often tossed around as if it carries a shared, precise meaning when it rarely does.
I first encountered this in the late 90s during a standing Monday morning Team Leads meeting. Our customer-facing website at the time had significant and ongoing usability issues. Discussion grew heated until someone waved it off with a hand gesture, “Oh, that’s just a governance issue.” We left the meeting that day with different ideas about what to do next. Yet, nothing changed.
Establishing and maintaining a right-sized intranet governance model is one of the most critical (and challenging) tasks for organizations aiming to build a world-class intranet experience. When we do it right, the intranet program will keep pace with the changing needs of the business over time.
If you’re anything like me, your intranet governance model will likely be overbuilt when you begin, and it will devolve over time. This is so normal that I want you to make a plan to address it periodically throughout the life of your intranet.
In this article, we’ll explore why intranet governance is vital, outline the different types of governance to consider, and provide a sample governance model with defined roles, responsibilities, and governing bodies.
What is intranet governance?
Intranet governance is the framework of decision-making rights, processes, and people responsible for managing your corporate intranet. It includes who makes decisions, how those decisions are made, and how they align with organizational goals.
Intranet governance serves two primary objectives:
Alignment: Establishing mutually agreed-upon roles and best practices ensures everyone involved in building, maintaining, and using the intranet is rowing in the same direction.
Execution: Streamlined processes will minimize bottlenecks, allowing the intranet to function effectively without unnecessary delays.
Why intranet governance matters
A well-governed intranet unifies effort behind key initiatives, ensures content is relevant and accessible, and improves collaboration across departments. As governance devolves, intranets risk becoming disorganized repositories of outdated content — and that matters: a USC Annenberg and Staffbase Study of 1,007 U.S. employees found 61% of people considering leaving their job cite poor internal communication as a key factor.
Governance provides the structure needed to:
Align with business goals: Ensure intranet capabilities and content support strategy — front-door intranets save employees an average 7.7 hours per month, worth roughly $3,500 in annual productivity per person, according to Staffbase benchmark data.
Maintain content quality: Keep information accurate, relevant, and up-to-date to serve and connect employees and stakeholders effectively.
Balance competing priorities: Address tensions between data security, ease of use, stability, innovation, and departmental versus company-wide objectives.
Enable scalability: Allow the intranet to grow and adapt to changing business needs without losing coherence.
Types of intranet governance
When making a governance plan for your intranet, start by clarifying what type of governance. Intranet governance can be categorized into three distinct but interconnected levels: strategic, operational, and tactical. Each level addresses different types of decisions that impact the intranet’s effectiveness and alignment with organizational goals.
Strategic governance
Strategic governance ensures the intranet’s capabilities align with the company’s overarching direction, guiding high-level decisions on features, integrations, and technologies for long-term evolution.
For example, consider a global retail chain with a strategic initiative to enhance customer personalization in stores and online. The intranet could support this specific strategic initiative by integrating a centralized customer data platform, enabling store associates to access real-time customer preferences and purchase history via the intranet.
This feature would help retail employees to consistently provide tailored product recommendations, aligning the intranet’s capabilities with the company's goal of delivering a personalized shopping experience, ultimately driving customer loyalty and sales.
The strategic governing body plays a critical role in aligning the intranet’s development with the company’s strategic initiatives to enhance customer personalization.
By making high-level decisions, the strategic governing body ensures the intranet evolves to support the company’s personalization strategy, enabling store associates to access real-time customer data and deliver tailored experiences. Specifically, their role should include a number of distinct elements.
Key role considerations:
Defining strategic alignment: The governing body would ensure the intranet’s capabilities support the company’s goal of delivering personalized customer experiences. They would evaluate how intranet features — like integrating a customer data platform — align with the company’s broader objectives of increasing customer loyalty and sales.
Decision-making on features and integrations: The governing body would approve the adoption of the centralized customer data platform, assessing its feasibility, cost, and impact. They would prioritize this integration over other potential intranet enhancements to ensure resources focus on strategic priorities.
Technology and vendor selection: The governing body would oversee the selection of technologies or vendors for the customer data platform, ensuring compatibility with existing systems and long-term scalability to support the company’s global operations.
Resource allocation: The governing body would allocate budgets and resources for developing and implementing the intranet’s new features, ensuring the project aligns with the company’s financial and operational goals.
Performance metrics and oversight: The governing body would establish KPIs, such as improved customer satisfaction scores or increased sales from personalized recommendations, to measure the intranet’s impact. They’d monitor progress to ensure the initiative delivers on strategic objectives.
Operational governance
Operational governance manages the flow of content and capabilities within the intranet. This includes processes for request management, prioritization, and ensuring that new content or narratives are effectively integrated and understood by users. Operational governance answers questions like: How is new content prioritized? Where does it live? How is it presented to employees?
Operational governance is the backbone of an effective intranet, and in my experience, it’s typically the main day-to-day responsibility of a centralized intranet team or program leader. Whether you’re building operational governance from scratch or refining an existing framework, the primary accountability is to ensure communicators know how to submit a request, how your organization will decide what new content areas or audience groups will be included, and how you are prioritizing this work.
Key considerations:
Establishing workflows for content creation and approval
Prioritizing content and features based on business needs
Ensuring seamless integration of new narratives or capabilities
Tactical governance
Tactical governance handles the day-to-day decisions that keep the intranet running smoothly — ensuring content is accurate, relevant, and up-to-date, as well as managing routine updates and maintenance tasks. Tactical governance is where subject matter experts and content creators shine, ensuring the intranet remains a reliable resource for employees.
Whereas the operational governance considerations are the primary day-to-day work of the centralized intranet team or program leader, tactical governance concerns may be executed by communicators and subject matter experts across the business — possibly hundreds of them. As an Intranet Program Leader I have had the most success when approaching these tactical governance considerations as a “Content Manager Program” (or similarly named program.)
Examples of tactical governance include bi-weekly or monthly training opportunities; access to “help” content on the intranet itself; weekly office hours opportunities for real-time help with specific content challenges; and special recognitions to shine light on content creators who are doing great work.
Key considerations:
Maintaining content accuracy and relevance
Supporting content creators with tools and best practices
Monitoring and updating content to reflect current needs
Governance best practices
To build an effective intranet governance model, organizations must focus on clarity, leadership, transparency, and measurement. Below are six best practices to guide the process:
1. Establish a governing board
A governing board is essential for overseeing strategic, operational, and tactical decisions. This board should include representatives from key business units, internal communications, and IT to ensure diverse perspectives.
The board’s responsibilities include reviewing and approving content strategies, intranet capabilities (e.g., social features or mobile access), and target audiences.
2. Appoint a program leader
An Intranet Program Manager, supported by a deputy for succession planning, should oversee the intranet program. This leader acts as a bridge between stakeholders by presenting options, facilitating discussions, and reporting outcomes to the governing board. The program leader ensures alignment across teams and drives the intranet’s strategic vision.
3. Prioritize transparency
Transparency in decision-making builds trust and accountability. Clearly articulate roles and responsibilities at all governance levels — strategic, operational, and tactical. There should be a section on the intranet defining the decision-making processes, making it easy for stakeholders to understand who is accountable for what.
4. Lead, don’t control
Governance empowers rather than restricts (to the greatest reasonable extent). For example, instead of tightly controlling content publishing, train subject matter experts on best practices, share insights on what resonates with audiences, provide opportunities to review performance metrics, and recognize those who are doing a good job. This approach fosters ownership and creativity while maintaining consistency.
5. Measure and report
Defining success metrics and establishing measurement routines are critical for evaluating the intranet’s impact. Metrics might include user engagement data (including analytic data such as number of views, comments, and likes, as well as qualitative data such as periodic survey responses), content accuracy, or time-to-publish for new content.
Regular reporting sessions allow teams to analyze data, discuss trends, and refine strategies. Establishing baselines early helps track progress and identify areas for improvement.
6. Create space for healthy tension
Competing priorities — such as data security versus ease of use, stability versus innovation, or departmental versus company-wide objectives — are inevitable. An effective governance model acknowledges these tensions and provides a forum for stakeholders to discuss and resolve them. For example, the governing board can mediate discussions to ensure decisions benefit the company, employees, customers, and supporting teams.
Building the right governance model
Governance is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Organizations must commit to establishing governance, monitoring performance, and addressing issues promptly. Complex issues, such as competing business priorities, may surface during content publishing. A strong governance model creates space for open discussion to effectively resolve these conflicts.
As you evaluate your current digital communication efforts, consider:
What tactical governance structures exist to keep content accurate, relevant, and up-to-date?
What operational governance processes manage content prioritization and placement?
What strategic governance mechanisms ensure the intranet aligns with business goals?
How are these structures performing, and what adjustments are needed?
Example governance model
Below is a practical governance model template to help organizations right-size their intranet governance. This model outlines key roles, responsibilities, and governing bodies to ensure alignment, efficiency, and scalability.
Governance structure (Collaborative governance example)
How Staffbase supports scalable intranet governance
Over the years, I’ve learned that good governance doesn’t happen by accident — it needs the right balance of structure and flexibility, supported by tools that help people work smarter, not harder. If you're working with an intranet platform like Staffbase, there are several built-in capabilities that can help reinforce your governance model without adding unnecessary complexity.
Here’s how Staffbase can support governance at every level:
Centralized oversight with distributed publishing
Governance is easier when everyone knows their role. Staffbase allows you to assign publishing permissions based on roles or locations, so local editors can manage their own content areas while a central team maintains oversight. It’s a scalable way to delegate without losing control.
Clear workflows and approval processes
Operational governance often breaks down when there’s no clear path from content creation to publication. With Staffbase, you can define approval flows and make it easier for teams to prioritize and launch content in a consistent, trackable way.
Guardrails for contributors
Not everyone contributing to your intranet will be a trained communicator — and that’s okay. Governance works best when contributors have support. Staffbase lets you embed editorial guidance, templates, and help content right where people need it, reducing confusion and enabling quality at scale.
Content lifecycle tools
To avoid the slow slide into “intranet sprawl,” you need mechanisms for reviewing and retiring content. Staffbase includes features like publishing schedules, review reminders, and content expiration settings to help keep things current.
Data to inform decisions
Governance shouldn’t run on gut instinct alone. Staffbase’s analytics allow you to see how content is performing across different segments or topics — which helps you refine priorities, spot gaps, and have better conversations with stakeholders.
In short, tools like Staffbase can make it easier to operationalize your governance plan — not by controlling every detail, but by enabling clarity, consistency, and shared ownership across the organization.
