Requests arrive on an intranet without a queue. Somebody wants a site for a new project, somebody else wants their story higher up the home page, and a team asks whether they can share a library with an agency. Each gets answered by whoever happens to be asked, which works until two answers to the same question contradict each other.
The decisions that keep coming back
Governance only has to cover the decisions that come round again. Common ones on an intranet include who gets a new site and who approves the request, what appears on the home page, whether a team can turn external sharing on for a site, what the publishing standard requires and when exceptions are allowed, when content gets retired, and which sites are held back from search and Copilot.
Every intranet has its own version of that list. Writing yours out shows the gaps, because some of those questions will have no name against them.
Deciding something is not the same as doing it
Deciding something and doing it get treated as one job, and the deciding is what gets dropped. A meeting that reviews the content calendar, chases overdue pages and assigns next month's campaign will fill its hour every time. Setting the rule that external sharing stays off by default takes one conversation. Turning it off across the sites that have it, and going back to the team that wanted it, is the work that follows.
Splitting the decisions between IT, internal communications and the business
As far as we know, no ownership model has an evidence-based winner, and independent research on how these arrangements perform is largely absent. So what follows is a recommendation from practice rather than a research finding.
Three groups usually have a stake. Internal communications, or whoever manages the intranet, decides content, structure, navigation and the publishing standard. IT decides the tenant-wide settings and anything with a security or compliance consequence, including who can create sites and groups, external sharing and retention. The business areas decide what they publish and who in their team can publish it.
Somebody has to own the intranet across all of that, and that owner can be a person or a team. Smaller organizations tend to land on one manager and larger ones on an intranet team, and either works as long as somebody can name who decides.
Whether you need a governance group
Organizations arrange this in different ways, and two of them are common. One is a group with fixed membership from IT, internal communications and the larger publishing areas, meeting monthly or quarterly, with an agenda of decisions to make rather than a status update to hear. The other is a single owner who decides, consults the people affected, and takes the few decisions that need broader agreement to an existing forum.
Either can work, and so can something in between, as long as somebody can say who decides. A group with no owner tends to defer, and an owner with nowhere to test a decision tends to be overruled later. Find the arrangement that fits how your organization already works.
Settling disagreements and handling exceptions
Where a decision is tenant-wide, our view is that IT has the final say, because IT has a wider remit than the intranet and carries the consequences across the rest of it. Where the decision is about content, structure or standards, it belongs to whoever manages the intranet, and IT can argue against a choice there without making it.
Frequent disagreements usually mean the split of decision rights is wrong rather than that the arbitration needs improving. Regular conversation between the two groups prevents most of them, and a senior sponsor with an interest in the intranet achieving its goals settles the rest (worth identifying that person before you need them).
Exceptions work the same way. Every standard produces requests to be let off it, and one with no route for those requests gets ignored quietly rather than argued with. Decide who can grant an exception and where the answer gets written down, because an exception nobody records is indistinguishable from a change to the standard.
Recording decisions so they survive turnover
A record that outlives the people who made the decisions can be short: what was decided, when, who decided it, and a sentence of reasoning, on a page the people affected can find. Keep it lighter than you think you need, because a record heavier than the team will maintain goes out of date and still gets quoted.
Resourcing and revisiting the arrangement
Governance that is not part of anybody's job tends to stay an intention. The arrangement holds up better when managing the intranet and governing it both sit in somebody's objectives with time attached.
Revisit the arrangement once a year, and whenever something underneath it changes, such as a reorganization or a change in who publishes. That is a different rhythm from the monitoring the platform does for you: the content management assessment hub in the SharePoint admin center, a guided assessment of how content is being managed, is recommended for a rerun every 30 days and is part of SharePoint Advanced Management. Who acts on what it finds is a decision you make once.
Where this stops short
Nothing in Microsoft 365 allocates a decision. The SharePoint admin center will show you who has access to what and will notify a site owner, and no report will tell you who should have decided on that access. Most writing on intranet governance either skips this subject or implies a tool covers it.
The next steps are on paper. Write out the decisions on your intranet that come round more than once, then put a name against each one. Where two names appear, work out which one holds the decision. Where a decision has no name, that is the list to take to whoever sponsors the intranet and then set a date to look at the whole thing again.
Common questions
Who should own the intranet, IT or internal communications?
Internal communications, or a dedicated intranet team, usually owns the intranet, while IT owns the platform it runs on. That works when the intranet has a clear owner accountable for it achieving its goals and IT holds the tenant-wide settings such as external sharing and retention.
What decisions should an intranet governance group make?
The ones that come round regularly, such as who gets a new site and who approves it, what goes on the home page, and when content gets retired. Every intranet has its own list, and anything that happens once does not need an owner. If the agenda fills up with chasing overdue pages, the group has turned into a delivery meeting.
How do you document intranet governance decisions?
A short page listing each decision, the date, who made it and a sentence of reasoning is enough, kept where the people affected can find it. The date and the name are what settle the question when it comes back after somebody has left.
