At Intranets2011, Hugh from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia is talking about evolving an intranet team as an intranet evolves with SharePoint.

Key points:
– Mid-2008 – 250 authors requesting publication of simple changes. 50-60 change requests per day. Required 6 people full time to keep the Intranet alive. Technology was HTML via Dreamweaver.
– The solution – deployed SharePoint 2007, and went for a fully decentralized operating model (for content authorship).
– For authors, have to balance quality and productivity. Offer training, induction, and support for new authors.
– Initially, with the change to decentralized authorship, the team went from “I’ll change the content for people” to “I’m going to take phone calls all day to help people to make changes.” This happened, but it eventually went away. One key for CBA – was the development of the CBA Intranet playbook – using the Intranet to support the Intranet. Also have an author community area. Authors can ask questions, others can answer.
– On governance, “decisions reached with others, best done over coffee.” But then we document these.
– Key milestones – 3 months of vision development and the future state, 4 months on creating new skills in the team, and 2 years on migration (selling it to the business, rolling it out and operating it). In other words, plan for enough time to make it real.
– Measuring what you’re doing each day / week / month, is critical to showing what’s changing. Quantitative analysis is important for proving benefits.
– Satisfaction with the Intranet has improved – from 61% (in December 2007) to 80% (in July 2010).
– The Intranet team reduced their content publishing time by 50%, and the business units got their content published faster.
– The team today – is smaller than it used to be, but as a result of getting rid of editing tasks, the team can work on new opportunities – eg., team spaces for collaboration, Yammer for groups and communities, video publishing, and more.
– future challenges – one homepage for 43,000 people, personalization / localization / socialization, making search work better, and seamless integration of people and systems.
– Do we go from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010? Now? Or later?