There’s an adage that is old for the intranet age (since they came to be mainstream in the early 90s) that says you shouldn’t put anything on the intranet that you wouldn’t put in print. It relates to the older adage that you shouldn’t print anything that you wouldn’t want anyone outside the company to read.
Your content is valuable. You wouldn’t want to share most of it with the outside world – especially the competition or media. However, if you are making content available via the intranet then it is possible it can be leaked externally. The number one leaking culprit, of course, is the employee.
There are three general positions or models to adopt vis a vis content protection:
- Open market – publish just about anything you can on the corporate intranet.
- Closed market – put sever constraints on what can be published.
- Asynchronous market – a hybrid model that entrusts employees with a certain level of responsibility to maintain confidentiality.
My own personal opinion is that if you’ve hired and trusted an individual to do a job that the organization deems crucial enough to justify the pay then most individuals are trustworthy and not likely to leak confidential information to outside sources. On the other hand, I wouldn’t publish any corporate top secrets either. As such I recommend most companies adopt an asynchronous model that assumes a certain level of responsibility and trustworthiness of employees but does not make widely available all information and data to all employees.
Regardless, intranet and corporate information managers do have a responsibility to inform employees of their responsibility and to limit the organization’s liability. Such action includes the development of several policies:
- Editorial policy
- Terms of use
- Acceptable use
Editorial policy
Your editorial policy is less of a legal security blanket and more of a definition of roles and responsibilities of those developing and maintaining online content. The editorial policy should include details on…
- content types
- style acceptability
- news determinants (e.g. currency, impact, etc.)
- formatting
- archiving
- photo treatments and bylines
- content management system rules and directions
- copyright and legal
- privacy and security
- governance including roles and responsibilities
- taxonomy (classification)
- site registration and indexing
Terms of use
Terms of use is a standard legal disclaimer. It says who owns it and declares the copyright, disclaims accuracy of content, etc.
Acceptable use
Acceptable use spells out the rules. Thall shall not…
- Email content outside of the company.
- Print and distribute content outside of the company.
- Release content to any media outlet.
- Rewrite or reproduce content for personal purposes or profit without the expressed written consent of the company (legal department).
Page footers
If you’re not already doing so make sure you have coded into your style sheets or CMS templates a footer that always includes the following:
- A legal disclaimer
- Terms of use
- Copyright stamp
- Name and email address of author
- Date of publish
While clients have hired me to develop these policies and standards the work is not really rocket science. It just takes a little time and thought that could save your organization some headaches in the future.
