Select Australasia discussed the merits of transitioning from a centralized to a decentralized intranet at a conference held in Sydney yesterday.

Speaking at Key Forum’s Managing and Maintaining a Decentralized Intranet Conference, Select Australasia’s web administrator, Ms Caralyne Blackburn told delegates: “We needed a scalable intranet which could be updated with a minimum of fuss. It had to be something that each of our service departments, and the individual brands could use – and more importantly, update and develop themselves as required.

Intranet DASHBOARD was adopted by Select Australasia in April 2005 as part of their decentralized intranet strategy. Select’s business goal was to increase their internal communications and build a stronger sense of community. This has been achieved by using Intranet DASHBOARD as the solution for their intranet platform. iD delivers the infrastructure for building, creating and administrating an intranet as well as over 40 immediately deployable tools and applications.

“With Intranet DASHBOARD we can quickly and simply add new sub sites – for new brands or departments and assign them to the ‘real’ owners of the content. This has offered controlled flexibility in being able to assign people to areas of content, locking down certain parts of the layout to create a consistent style. Authors now have the flexibility to change the sites enough to appeal to their audience and create a feeling of ownership,” stated Ms Blackburn in her presentation.

IT Managers and CIOs are realizing that their team doesn’t have to do it all when it comes to the uploading of content and day-to-day management of the intranet. Organizations are adopting a decentralized model for their intranet in which each department, or publisher, owns the content and understands the message rather than passing it onto the IT department to do for them. This is how organizations such as Select Australasia, IOOF, Shell, and Quiksilver continue to create buy in from their staff, and in turn increase the productivity of each department.

In order for an intranet project to succeed in the longer term it is imperative that a holistic knowledge management strategy be put into place from the outset. We found that 83% of the organizations surveyed are using iD to facilitate their knowledge management strategy through tools such as Document Manager, Content Publisher, Project Space, Forums, News and Polls.