An intranet is a web site that enables your internal employees to share information, receive company broadcasts, and update their own personal information within a personal page or profile. Some of the most common functionality available on intranets is:
- Document repository and document sharing (e.g., company forms, process documentation, product documentation)
- Employee lookup
- Document collaboration
- Community based knowledge sharing, such as Blogs, wikis, discussion boards, surveys
- Self-service requests and updates
Intranet content can be secured, tailored, and targeted toward the particular user logged in. Furthermore, an intranet can be divided up into multiple sub-sites to give groups of employees an area of their own. It is common for the structure of your intranet to mimic your organizational structure, allowing collaboration at the department level in addition to the company level.
Planning and governance
How does one plan, develop, and manage an intranet?
Intranets allow collaboration both across the company as well as within a single department. It is common for the structure of your intranet to mimic your organizational structure. Departments thus have complete control over their small piece of the pie. However, this comes with its own problems...
Many organizations become discouraged by their intranet roll outs because no formal guidelines or templates were established. Often, what results is an incongruous implementation of many individuals following their own structure (or even worse, no structure at all). Such intranets fail to gain company-wide acceptance not because there is no valuable content to offer, but because the result is so disorganized and difficult to navigate that people cannot find the information they want or need.
Furthermore, intranets don't just "run themselves". Clear communication plans, governance rules, quotas and limits, and service monitoring are crucial for keeping your intranet both manageable and highly available. When rolling out an intranet, it is important to establish clear information architecture and governance guidelines to ensure that information is well organized across the company.
Security
Intranets are usually hosted within your own network, having the advantage that the repository of users (e.g., either an Active Directory domain, another LDAP repository, a SQL server database) can readily be exposed to the intranet site. Although not typically made available to the general public, an intranet may be accessible over the public internet and accessed outside your own computer network while still secured by your internal repository of login accounts. Regardless, one needs to consider such security decisions at the project outset, not as an afterthought.
Taking a marketing-driven approach
We all know that happy employees produce the best quality work and are the most likely to remain loyal. We also know that the keys to employee satisfaction remain consistent across various industries and organizations - they want access to tools and information that will allow them to do their jobs efficiently; they want educational opportunities that will help them extend their careers; and they want open and frequent communication. Yet, despite this awareness, organizations often take a lax approach to developing the one tool that sits at the crux of employee interaction: their intranet site.
That's why taking a full-blown web development approach to your next intranet initiative is the right thing to do. You need to define Key Performance Indicators and develop a digital scorecard, and understand what it takes to manage an employee-focused project effectively.
If you consider your intranet site a business-building tool rather than an afterthought, you can generate a positive culture, and enhance employee relations, team building and internal communications.
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