Benefits
- Workforce productivity: Intranets can also help users to locate and view information faster and use applications relevant to their roles and responsibilities. With the help of a web browser interface, users can access data held in any database the organization wants to make available, anytime and - subject to security provisions - from anywhere within the company workstations, increasing employees' ability to perform their jobs faster, more accurately, and with confidence that they have the right information. It also helps to improve the services provided to the users.
- Time: Intranets allow organizations to distribute information to employees on an as-needed basis; Employees may link to relevant information at their convenience, rather than being distracted indiscriminately by electronic mail.
- Communication: Intranets can serve as powerful tools for communication within an organization, vertically and horizontally. From a communications standpoint, intranets are useful to communicate strategic initiatives that have a global reach throughout the organization. The type of information that can easily be conveyed is the purpose of the initiative and what the initiative is aiming to achieve, who is driving the initiative, results achieved to date, and who to speak to for more information. By providing this information on the intranet, staff have the opportunity to keep up-to-date with the strategic focus of the organization. Some examples of communication would be chat, email, and or blogs. A great real world example of where an intranet helped a company communicate is when Nestle had a number of food processing plants in
Scandinavia . Their central support system had to deal with a number of queries every day (McGovern, Gerry). When Nestle decided to invest in an intranet, they quickly realized the savings. McGovern says the savings from the reduction in query calls was substantially greater than the investment in the intranet.- Promote common corporate culture: Every user is viewing the same information within the Intranet.
- Enhance Collaboration: With information easily accessible by all authorised users, teamwork is enabled.
- Cross-platform Capability: Standards-compliant web browsers are available for Windows, Mac, and UNIX.
- Built for One Audience: Many companies dictate computer specifications. Which, in turn, may allow Intranet developers to write applications that only have to work on one browser (no cross-browser compatibility issues).
Planning and creation
Most organizations devote considerable resources into the planning and implementation of their intranet as it is of strategic importance to the organization's success. Some of the planning would include topics such as:
- The purpose and goals of the intranet
- Persons or departments responsible for implementation and management
- Functional plans, information architecture, page layouts, design.[4]
- Implementation schedules and phase-out of existing systems
- Defining and implementing security of the intranet
- How to ensure it is within legal boundaries and other constraints
- Level of interactivity (eg wikis, on-line forms) desired.
- Is the input of new data and updating of existing data to be centrally controlled or devolved.
The actual implementation would include steps such as:
- Securing senior management support and funding.[7]
- Business requirements analysis.
- User involvement to identify users' information needs.
- Installation of web server and user access network.
- Installing required user applications on computers.
- Creation of document framework for the content to be hosted.[8]
- User involvement in testing and promoting use of intranet.
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