Running an intranet: content ownership, roles and preventing decay

Building an intranet takes a few weeks; keeping it alive is a responsibility spread over years. Abandoned portals share a trait that is organisational rather than technical: nobody's name is written next to them.

Who runs what?

A healthy setup separates at least three roles:

• System administrator. Modules, branding, user and department management, integrations. Usually IT or HR systems.
• Content editor. Publishes announcements, news, documents and events. HR and internal communications.
• Section owner. Responsible for keeping one area current — health and safety policies, say, or sales material.

The critical distinction: an editor should be able to publish content but not change user permissions or HR-sensitive data. Authorisation must be enforced in the data layer, not by hiding things in the interface — concealing a button is not an access control. We detail that distinction on our security page.

How is content ownership assigned?

Every section needs a single named owner, and that name should be visible to employees. Collective ownership like "the HR team" turns into no ownership in practice. When assigning an owner, record three things together: the responsible person, the review frequency, and the date of the last review.

Preventing decay

Nothing destroys trust in an intranet faster than out-of-date content. An employee who finds last year's leave procedure stops searching next time and asks their manager instead. Practical measures:

1. Freshness review. A regular pass that lists content untouched for a defined period.
2. Publication date and version. Policies should show a version number and an effective date.
3. The courage to archive. Unused content isn't deleted, but it is archived; it should not pollute search results.
4. Reminders to owners. A notification when a review falls due.

Announcement discipline

In an intranet where everything is an announcement, nothing is. The distinction that works has three tiers: critical (acknowledgement required), informational (stays in the feed) and news (cultural content, archived). Keeping the critical tier to a few uses a month is what preserves its meaning.

For announcements that require acknowledgement, who can see the tracking list matters as much as the list itself. A manager should see their own team's status; not everyone should see everyone's.

Measurement and regular review

A thirty-minute review once a month is enough for most companies. Four numbers to look at:

• Weekly active user rate and its trend
• The most and least viewed sections
• Read rate for critical announcements
• Search queries that returned nothing

The fourth is the most valuable: what employees looked for but couldn't find writes next month's content plan directly.

Menu and homepage management

Over time the homepage becomes a shop window everyone wants to add to. Two rules push back: when a component is added, another comes off; and only content that changes weekly belongs there. Information that changes monthly belongs in its own section.

In menu naming, choose the employee's word over internal jargon. "Leave and payroll" gets found; "human resources process management" does not.

Audit trail and succession

As important as content management is having a record of who changed what. When a policy was updated and by whom, who raised a user's permissions — these should be visible. That isn't only a compliance requirement but a practical one: "when did this change?" gets asked a few times a year without fail.

The second durability question is succession. If the only person with the administrator role leaves, a company can lose access to its own portal. At least two people should hold full rights, and they should not sit in the same team.

Holiday periods need a deputy plan too; a critical announcement waiting because one person is away is a governance gap, not a configuration error.

The annual rhythm

A well-run intranet reviews its scope once a year: which modules are genuinely used, which can be switched off, what new need has appeared? The decision to close something is as valuable as the decision to open it — an unused module doesn't just take up space, it makes navigation harder.

If you are still in rollout, see our 90-day plan; for permission details, the platform page is a good starting point.