Steady State Governance

1
Steady State Governance
DIG FOR VICTORY

• A Proposed Approach for
• Governing the Portal Support, Post Go-Live

Note that this is merely one of many possible
models. The optimum approach for your
organisation will depend largely on how diverse
your organisation is, both geographically and in
lines of business. High Diversity implies a
fully decentralised approach (not assumed here)
2
Org Design Principles

• Back-to-Back Business Technical Teams
• In a Web-based e-business environment, it is
  essential that business and technical teams work
  closely together!
• Ideally, teams should be co-located for maximum
  benefit, so that small changes and faults can be
  progressed quickly
• Balance between centralised and de-centralised
• To fully free and harness the creative genius of
  all your people across the entire enterprise
• But retain consistency for information and
  applications used by all (e-HR, e-Finance, etc.)
• Balance between support and ongoing change
• An intranet is not a static system, but rather an
  organic and constantly evolving construct
• Thus, the steady state team needs to be able to
  manage small, medium and larger changes alongside
  keeping the rest of the site running as normal

3
Org Design
Intranet Director
Intranet Change Board Governing ongoing changes
to the intranet, to get well managed
coordinated development
Intranet Management Team Monitoring performance,
usage and feedback. Fixing bugs and managing
issues
Company Webmaster
Business Team Technical Team
4
Business Skill Sets

• Intranet Exploitation Team
• A single visionary strategist with good knowledge
  of emerging e-business models and technology
• Experienced in financial appraisal techniques,
  familiar with your business processes and
  convincing with senior execs
• Primary Navigation Team
• A small team, which includes a Taxonomist (to
  keep file libraries reliable and relevant) and
  dotted line Finance, HR and Procurement process
  improvement expertise
• Community Support Team
• Long-serving, respected, matrix resources with a
  good local network of contacts in their
  respective business units
• Perhaps a single central co-ordinator
  (Information Architect) to set policies and
  standards, style guides, CMS templates and so on.
  
• Intranet Management Team
• Perhaps only one experienced Operational Manager,
  with a background in business system ownership.
  Negotiates changes to SLAs and is accountable for
  site availability and performance

5
Technical Skill Sets

• Larger Change Project Office
• Need Programme Administration skills (to maintain
  a register of changes being managed and handle
  cross-programme benefits, costs, dependency and
  progress monitoring)
• Need business analytical skills to qualify
  changes which have approved-in-principle and
  produce detailed costs to complete, ROI and
  Business Case materials
• Need commercial skills in order to handel
  supplier tendering and selection, then to manage
  them through the change process
• Small Change Team
• Multi-skilled resources capable of doing
  everything from business requirements analysis to
  functional design, coding, testing and release to
  live
• Skills in intermediate tools like MS-Excel,
  MS-Access and Business Objects plus enterprise
  experience (Oracle etc.)
• Experienced in use of CMS and Web Design tools
• Level 2/3 Support Team
• Please refer to separate presentation in the
  chapter on Steady State Organisation

6
Guidelines for Resourcing

• Exploitation team benchmark is one person for
  every 10,000 people in your organisation or major
  BU
• Primary navigation team benchmark is one person
  for every 30 pages of common content or major
  application
• Community support team benchmark is one person
  for every 50 identifiable communities on the
  portal
• All three teams are managed together to maximise
  central synergies (although may not be co-located)

• Intranet Change Board meet at least monthly (or
  by arrangement) to review and approve changes
• Purpose is to control supply and challenge demand
  (if appropriate). In other words, the main
  question is can we do this and if so, when?
  rather than whether or not the change makes
  business sense
• Support team is a classic 3 Tiered approach (more
  on this in the Steady State Organisation chapter)

7
Conclusions

• Important to get the balance right
• Between business and IS skills
• Between centralised control and decentralised
  empowerment
• Between ongoing change and supporting whats
  there now
• Your team need not be large
• There are many roles, but single FTEs are capable
  of handling several different roles at once
• Better to start very small and only grow when it
  appears essential to do so
• But be prepared to scale up as your portal grows,
  so that you can maintain coherence and
  consistency
• Be the voice of the user in a confused world
• Does the site continue to make sense?
• Can I find the things I need to do my job quickly
  and in the place I would expect them logically to
  be?
• Is all the information still up-to-date?