Content Management on Intranets: Centralized, Distributed, and Hybrid Models

Summary: Three different content-management models enforce who creates, owns, and publishes intranet content.

Content can make or break an intranet. Employees access the company intranet for specific information related to their jobs. Unlike the content found on a company’s public-facing website, intranet content often comes from many different crossfunctional contributors, such as human resources, internal communications, and individual departments. The right content-management model for your intranet will preserve its integrity as a supportive and productive digital workplace hub.

Definition: A content-management model is a clear set of roles, responsibilities, standards, and guidelines which concern how and by whom content is produced, published, updated, and retired.

(This is different from a content-management system [CMS] which is a technology for getting stuff published easily and consistently. Some CMS software includes features to support tracking or even enforcing elements of the content-management model: for example, automatically notifying the owner of a piece of content that has not been updated for a certain amount of time.)

We’ve found that intranets follow one of three content-management models: centralized, distributed, or hybrid. In this article, we discuss each content-management model, along with the benefits and drawbacks of each.

Centralized Content-Management Model

In a centralized content-management model, content creators seek approval from a central team before the content is posted on the intranet. Once approved, the central team publishes the content on the creator’s behalf.

In a centralized-content model, a single team (or a very small number of teams) owns the production, management, and publication of content on the intranet. This central team is often an internal-communications team or a dedicated intranet-product team.

In a centralized model, anyone who wants to publish intranet content — whether it’s on the homepage or on a specific department’s or team’s page — submits a request to the central team. Some organizations we’ve worked with have formalized processes, such as using an online-request form or a dedicated email address to manage content requests. Others use an ad-hoc arrangement, where each department has a dedicated point of contact on the central team for raising requests. This latter approach is often better as it increases efficiency, distributes the workload, and minimizes context switching for people on the central team.

Additional benefits of this model include:

1. Unwanted content doesn’t get posted: The central team acts as a content gatekeeper, so it’s unlikely that teams or departments publish content just because they think they need it, rather than considering the needs of their users.
2. All content is reviewed: The central team can enforce content standards and guidelines, including proper formatting and presentation.
3. Few people need to be trained: Many organizations encounter challenges with hard-to-use content-management systems (CMS). With a centralized model, only the central team needs to frequently use it, so there is no need for widespread, ongoing training for those outside of the central team. Additionally, the central team doesn’t need to train employees on writing for the web as its team members are the only ones responsible for ensuring that the published content meets necessary standards.
4. The central team has a holistic understanding of intranet content: Given that all requests come through the central team, its members understand what information is available and where it lies on the intranet. When new content is added, they are able to determine where to place it, how to tag it, and what pages should link to it. Also, consistent content formats are more likely when fewer people publish, simply because there’s less risk of unthinking deviations from the agreed formats.

Unfortunately, there are also some drawbacks to this governance model:

1. Time-consuming for the central team: There must be resources and time available for the central team to review content requests and help individuals draft appropriate content.
2. Slow content-production cycles: Because content authors must go through an approval process, lead time is often needed before content can be published. In some cases, this lead time deters content creators from publishing content on the intranet at all and instead, they share information by other means. These practices ultimately make the intranet less useful to users.

Distributed Content-Management Model

In a distributed content model, content administrators across the organization can freely create, edit, and publish content.

In a distributed content-management model, content production is democratized. Instead of having a central team approve requests and publish new content, ownership is spread across the organization. Often, a central team only creates user accounts on the content-management system and provides initial training to new administrators. In this model, central-team members may also control the global navigation, certain content features on the homepage (e.g., a news carousel), and the search functionality.

Benefits of adopting this model include:

• A greater sense of ownership and engagement: Typically, intranets that favor democratization of content production and management create a shared feeling of ownership and contribute to an inclusive culture where all voices are important.
• Quicker content production cycles: Important content can be communicated or updated quickly, as administrators don’t need to seek approval. This ability is especially useful in organizations that are going through an abundance of change.

Unfortunately, there are also downsides to this approach:

• Heavy training requirements: The central team must often support new admins with CMS training, best practices for web content, and standards of use for specific page layouts or design-system components. In the absence of these guardrails, admins may too freely edit raw HTML or use whatever they think looks best for page layouts. Undoubtedly, these practices lead to uncontrollable inconsistencies and negatively impact the visual design and user experience of the intranet. More training is usually required to correct these bad habits.
• Regular auditing needed: Not everyone is skilled at writing for the web, nor is it realistic to assume that nondigital experts can quickly pick up the proper skill sets needed to effectively manage content. Despite providing content style guides and standards, content admins will often fall prey to bad practices when creating content. To keep content useful and usable, a central team needs to perform regular auditing. Common problems that need rectifying include: blank pages that have been created because there’s an expectation that they will be needed but then go unused, a lack of page descriptions, and poor microcontent authoring. For example, pages may miss meta descriptions, have nondescriptive page titles, or lack appropriate tagging, such that content will fail to appear in the search-results pages.
• Quantity over quality: Intranets that have a distributed content-management model often have far more pages than those which follow the other models. Often, these pages won’t have appropriate metadata (e.g., no keywords in page titles or incomplete meta descriptions) and will cause the site search to index irrelevant or outdated results, thus reducing search effectiveness.
• Content siloed by department: To make content production easy for content admins, the intranet’s information architecture will often be structured around admins and the pages they own. It’s much easier to give a human resources admin access to one HR page than to expect her to update elements on 10 different pages. However, this approach often means that content organization does not support users’ goals and tasks.
• Inconsistency in quality and tone of voice: When content is created by many different people, the content’s style and tone of voice can vary tremendously. The inconsistency isn’t as problematic as on a consumer-facing site, but it does degrade the employee user experience if one area of the intranet is friendly and casual and another is authoritative and formal.

Hybrid Content-Management Model

In a hybrid content-management model, a central team acts as a gatekeeper for some content, while other content can be freely created, edited, and published by content admins across the organization.

In a hybrid model, some content is owned by a central team, while other content ownership is distributed. Often, a central team will manage the homepage and top-level landing pages in the navigation. Requests for new navigational items or top-level pages are usually made to the central team. Secondary and tertiary pages are controlled by content admins who are distributed across the organization, but fully adhere to publication guidelines. This hybrid model provides a nice balance of freedom to create content within an experience framework: anyone can contribute content to the intranet, but admins help to ensure it meets the standards for relevance, writing style, and presentation before it is published. This approach keeps the content on the intranet relevant, tidy, and following standards. At this level, content admins may also create additional subcategory pages on their own and edit content, as needed.

Benefits of adopting this content-management model include:

• Control over the structure of most content: The structure of the intranet’s content is fixed at the top level and any change at this level is well-thought-out.
• An appropriate level of freedom for content admins: Unlike a centralized model, where users often complain that they can’t control their own content as much as they would like, in a hybrid model, content admins are given enough locus of control. This means that admins can provide their subject-matter expertise for the topics covered in the content, while digital and usability experts can maintain the organization, presentation, and communication nuances needed to maintain a favorable employee experience on the intranet.

Drawbacks include:

• Moderate training required: Though a smaller proportion of content admins are needed, a hybrid approach still requires proper training on how to use the CMS, writing for the web, and the proper use of page-level components, albeit not as much as a fully distributed content-management model.
• Moderate standards and auditing required: Content at the lower level still needs to follow specific standards and needs to be audited; however, this effort is much lower than what’s needed in a distributed content-management model.

Recommendations for Effective Intranet Content Management

Regardless of the content management model you choose, the following recommendations apply:

• There should always be a vision, goals, and a central team for the intranet. There should always be a team that looks at the big picture of the intranet to monitor whether it is achieving its goals, even though that team may not produce much content. Does the search perform well? Does the content produced support users in their tasks? Without these elements, the intranet risks morphing into a junk drawer.
• Content producers must be trained. Too many organizations simply train users only to use the CMS, or, even worse, they provide everyone with admin access and then fail to follow up with admins on whether they can access and properly use the CMS. Training should include not only how to use the CMS, but also how to write good copy and how to properly lay out pages. Templating goes beyond the header and left navigation; admins must also learn how to properly use intranet components to house in-page content.
• Your content management and governance model should be communicated widely. Great intranets we’ve studied provided specific standards and guidelines for who creates content, processes for making new requests, and when content should be retired. These standards were taken seriously and were communicated widely, so there’s no question about what content lives where and for how long. The best intranets didn’t dictate these standards per se, but everyone, from knowledge workers to stakeholders in leadership, communicated about why the guidelines exist and why they are important. Design principles and comprehensive style guides were available on the intranet for anyone to review and easily understand.

Choosing the right content-management model for your intranet and organization depends on a variety of factors, including the size of your organization, the goals of your intranet (is it a platform to connect employees across distributed offices or is it meant to support productivity, benefits, and corporate news?), the capacity of the team that owns the intranet, and the level of buy-in and support from senior leadership. Understanding what’s needed for each model to succeed can help organizations choose the right content-management model for the betterment of the intranet and, ultimately, of the employee experience.

Find even more on effective content management practices in our 2019 Intranet Design Annual and in our full-day course, Better Content: Strategies to Increase Quality and Effectiveness, at the UX conference.