BENEFITS OF INTRANET IN AN ORGANISATION.

Do you have an intranet? Are you aware of the massive benefits these things have on businesses?

What is an intranet?  It is often described as an internal website, something that only staff can see and use.

These are the benefits in which every business should consider:

1. Intranets have taken a considerable leap forward in the past 5 years and now include collaboration allowing directorates, teams and users to collaborate and communicate with documents, people (both internal and external), teams, projects, as well as providing feature rich, intuitive and easy to navigate environments.
2. In addition to this, intranet sites can now connect with external data sources (Wikipedia, Google etc.…) to provide additional real time data and enhanced knowledge across your business. This has significantly increased smarter working across teams and help speed up delivery of projects.
3. Intranets have become the standard in managing data including; policies, procedures, guidelines, protocols, resources, corporate documents, branding and logos etc.… (What, no more buckets and buckets of folders on a server that no-one manages, and probably cost you a fortune to back up?)
4. It joins business together: do you have multiple sites, or indeed a number of users working remotely? Intranet can fix many of the communications issues surrounding this disconnect, a must for the way the world is going.
5. Knowledge management. In its very broadest sense, knowledge management means capturing, organizing and retrieving corporate information. With all tools and information within the intranet, and employees constantly adding new information in the form of comments, discussions, blogs, documents; the intranet serves as a centralized place to capture important corporate information. Tools like search ensure that employees across the company network can find just the information they need to perform their jobs.
6. Productivity. An intranet is the “home” for employees (ideally) and the intranet desktop is probably the first thing they see in the morning. An intranet which gives employees’ access to all the tools and information they need to effectively perform that day’s tasks, every day, can go a thousand miles in improving productivity. 
7. An intranet can allow users to subscribe to information / data / groups, such as RSS feeds or automatically alerting them to any changes.  For example:

• Policies that have review, expiry and retention dates could automatically alert specific authors / users when these are being approached.
• A project group could be informed when a deadline is being approached or when an action has been completed.
• Users who subscribe to a policy, procedure, guideline or protocol document can be alerted when it is updated.

The two most sought after requirements for implementing an intranet are finding people and finding data. Therefore, good systems architecture is of paramount importance, along with presenting data that is relevant, to drive usability and efficiency across your business.

If you don’t have an intranet, have a think about how having one could solve some of your document storage and communication issues you may even find that your version of Microsoft Small Business server already has a free version, that you didn’t know you had!  It may even be that having your intranet in the cloud is the way more choices than ever to make your business more effective.

 by FOYA JOHN H.

BAPRM 42553