An Effective Intranet — All I Really Wanted for Christmas

According to the Wall Street Journal (quoting Forrester Research Inc.) the top 7 reasons why companies build or consider building intranets are to: let employees find information (94%); enable collaboration/information sharing (50%); automate business processes (44%); reduce costs (40%); provide secure, remote access via Web (25%); provide online training (17%); and, control access to content/applications (10%).

Consider, for example, how a new employee gets inducted into the organization. How and where does he/she find important information such as what the company holidays are, leave policies, the latest training manuals, etc.

How about learning the organization’s language - including common acronyms, definitions and tips? In larger organizations, such as government ministries and departments, even locating a colleague’s phone or extension number traditionally involves calling other colleagues and thumbing well-worn incomplete sheets of paper thumb-tacked to the wall. No wonder, according to Accenture Ltd., that 59% of managers in large US and UK companies reported that they regularly miss information that might be valuable to their jobs because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just cannot find it.

But, designing and building an intranet is only one aspect of what’s needed to ensure success. To ensure that the intranet is truly providing value to the organization, it must convert employees into dedicated repeat users. This in turn requires a steady diet of good, useful information and resources, backed by a clear demonstration of commitment at the highest management level. The catch is that useful information comes from everywhere in the organization. Given competing demands in any organization, without the active support of top management, it is very unlikely that efforts to develop intranet resources would be successful.

Success therefore requires a clear strategy that recognizes the cross-functional value of intranet resources, and which allocates clear ownership and responsibilities for the different aspects of intranet operations. The bottom line is that without addressing the the people and process issues, investments in software and hardware alone will not guarantee the returns sought.

As part of our intranet solution Cyberplex Africa offers two industry leading platforms — Microsoft SharePoint and The Adweb Agency’s Intranet Dashboard and then we combine them with best practice strategy development and implementation thus ensuring that your staff and organization clearly benefit from the investment. *click here* to let us help you with your intranet project.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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