The following are the importance or why the organization should have these systems:
Decision
Support
Organisational
flux, rising competitive pressures and the expanding global reach of many
organisations place a premium on information that helps executives to make the
decisions required to manage a company. New demands for transparency from
stakeholders and regulators magnify the need for better and more timely
information.
The
Intranet needs to provide two kinds of decision support;
- pull support when executives actually go out and look for the information they need in order to make decisions; and
- push support where the information is pushed to the executive by way of creating awareness, or educating or as an early warning status which requires action.
Pull
Support
When
people need to make decisions, they need to have access to the latest
information, be able to find the most up to date version of the document,
relevant reports etc.
Document
management used to be the domain of the individual on his own C-drive (and prior
to that in his filing cabinet), later documents were posted to share drives in
whatever categorisation made most sense to the individual. Gradually project
managers started imposing some structure on the share drive and people began
using the shared information to inform their decision making.
Today’s
business environment has become infinitely more complex and it has become
necessary for people, not only to look for what they need based on how they
expect the information to be categorised, but to be able to actively search
using key words on the Intranet.
Push
Support
Push
support is generally in the forms of RSS feeds which are set up in order to
ensure that the latest relevant information from outside the organisation is
reaching the right executive. This may be economic data, technology
development, trends analysis etc.
Push
support also includes aggregated information about the company in the form of
regularly updated news portals or progress reports etc.
Knowledge
Management is also an important part of decision making. All to often companies
deploy knowledge management tools without thinking about the kinds of decisions
it may support.
Risk
Mitigation
In
order to be fully equipped to make any decision it is clear that the executives
and employees need to have the correct information at the correct time. Care
must be taken with version control and other document management activities to
ensure that this is the case.
Company
Policies are also incredibly important when it comes to risk mitigation and of
course the documentation pertaining to governance must be easily findable and
accessible on the Intranet.
It
is also important to build corporate governance into the operational processes
on the Intranet. For example if certain people may not speak on behalf of the
organisation, they should not be able to post on the corporate blog, some
employees might need to be moderated and some actively encouraged to create
thought leadership blogs etc.
Risk
can also be mitigated by building flags into the Intranet, for example when a
senior engineer resigns, anyone who is working on a project with her is
immediately notified and can proactively co-opt a new resource onto the
project. Another example could be when a supplier has let the company down,
that the system alerts the accounts manager that there may be a delay on
delivery to the client.
Innovation
We
all know that the pace of change is rapidly increasing and the Intranet is a
fabulous collaboration tool for different employees from different parts of the
organisation to become aware of Innovation projects and participating in
innovating into the future.
Well
designed Intranets let the employees attach all the related documentation to
the Innovation project as well as the profiles of the individual participants,
so that in future this data can be interrogated to understand the innovation
process or to identify people will great innovation skills. This is a great
knowledge management tool.
Learning
The
Intranet can incorporate workflow which enables the employees to identify gaps
in their knowledge and to book themselves on courses. It can provide on-line
material and the succession plan can also be built into the individuals profile
as they learn and progress through the organisation.
Employee
Engagement
The
Intranet is a fantastic tool for connecting and communicating with employees,
whether it is providing them with interesting content, rewarding them for
contributions or enabling them to see how they are performing or just letting
them network and up-skill each other within professional communities of
interest.
The
ability to profile employees leads to all kinds of opportunities from improving
their search experience, enabling people to find certain skills within the
organisation.
The
days when an Intranet was a nice to have are gone. The modern Intranet is a
critical strategic and operational tool which no medium to corporate business
or public sector organisation should be without.
BY MUSA LILIAN BAPRM 42631
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