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Your intranet should be unique. It should reflect the properties that make your company unique. It should meet needs of your employees and managers and enable them to perform their jobs more effficiently and economically.
Take the time to identify what you want your intranet to accomplish. Create a wish list. The key is to involve your employees and managers in the process. Brainstorm ideas that would truly add value. Focus on information dissemination, automation of manual processes, and business intelligence. Look for ideas that improve productivity, reduce cost and create a sense of pride within the company.
Unlike traditional applications, it is easy to roll out intranets in several phases. Break your intranet strategy into components and implement a just few components at a time. Approach development of your intranet like you would any other project. Define your goals, develop your tasks and establish deadlines for milestones. Communicate the plan to the managers and developers and promote the project to the employees.
Intranets are highly visible projects so make the experience a positive one. Use key employees to QA their sections and provide feedback for new ideas and future development. Adding new features in phases will get your employees accessing the intranet quickly and they will see continual growth of content and services.
Intranets can be used to reduce costs in many ways. Eliminate production and distribution costs of printed materials. Develop a knowledge base that is up-to-date, accurate and always accessible to your entire staff. Procedures can be documented and frequently asked questions (FAQs) can be created for quick reference. Using the information on the intranet, employees can become more self-sufficient, decreasing their dependance on other employees with specialized skills and improving their efficiency.
As more employees work remotely, via wireless mobile devices or through VPN connections from home and branch offices, information distribution becomes even more important. The underlying technology of intranets provide better performance over these remote connections than typical applications. Instead of having to run complete applications over a remote connection, employees can access only the features they need from links on the company's intranet. Resources are conserved, applications perform better and employees have timely access to the information they need.
The technology to build an intranet has matured and the cost of building and maintaining an intranet has come down dramatically. Simple tools to create fully functioning sites are now included in the basic office suites by Microsoft, Macromedia and Sun as well as other vendors. As costs go down and functionality increases, your return on investment goes up. Plan your intranet now and start using it to your advantage tomorrow.
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