Why Have an Intranet?

The first, and most obvious, reason for creating an intranet is to save money. Building and maintaining an intranet is a significant investment. It stands to reason that such an investment must give tangible benefits to the organization that builds it. If spending all this time and effort isn't going to have a beneficial effect on the bottom line, then you should question why you're undertaking the project.

Putting the right tools on the intranet can reduce costs dramatically. A typical example is saving printing costs for commonly updated resources by placing them online instead. How an intranet can save you money will depend on your organization, each has its own unique problems, you'll need to consider which routine tasks could be made more efficient by moving them to an intranet. Essentially, creating an intranet should provide a good Return on Investment, which we'll be taking a look at in detail in Chapter 2.

Generally speaking the goal of an intranet is to facilitate the sharing of data and information between people and applications, possibly spread over several locations, and to encourage the efficient use of information resources within an organization. How does an intranet make this possible? Let's look at some of the objectives that companies hope to achieve by implementing an intranet:

Increasing Efficiency

Many organizations possess a very large amount of data. Obviously there will have to be an employee and payment system, a financial system, and usually one or more systems that are directly concerned with day-to-day business activities. Besides this there is a large amount of data that is not part of any discreet system but is still valuable to the company.

Very often employees will need to take the time to research this data, without being aware of the fact that a colleague already possesses it. It would be much more efficient if that knowledge could be stored on a centralized resource so that there would be less duplication of effort. The key to a effective intranet in terms of efficiency is largely one of determining which of these resources might be useful to other members of the organization and of finding a way to let those people know the resource exists, preferably at the exact moment it is required.

Obviously this is not strictly possible, but it should be the goal to treat knowledge as a valuable company resource. Making these resources easily available will leave users more time to do the work they needed the information for.

Teleworking

By centralizing a company's data resources on the intranet employees will have more freedom to move around, within, or outside of the company's physical location. In a paper-based office, information from the personnel department, for example, could only be found in the personnel office, or possibly requested by internal mail, but on the intranet it can be interacted with from any location.

Users are no longer required to be in a specific place in order to access information. This makes it possible for users in flexible working locations, working 'on the road', and even working from home to access any company data needed to complete their tasks.

Community

As companies grow it becomes more and more difficult to give employees the feeling that they are part of an organization. Large companies spend a lot of money and resources to get employees motivated to work for the good of the company instead of just punching in and punching out on time.

An intranet can be designed to act as an interface between the company and its employees. Giving employees a central place where they can find information on the organization and their coworkers and communicate with other people in the organization can help to create a feeling of community among the workers.

Large companies in particular have an increasing need for this type of communication with their employees. An intranet can provide an ideal platform for distributing news, connecting employees, and discussing projects with workers on other sites.

Third Party Access

Centralizing company data on the intranet also creates possibilities for sharing data and knowledge with business partners and clients. This information can be made available for clients as an extranet. For example product information can be shared with resellers, stock with suppliers, and status information with customers. Besides increasing the exchange of information with the outside world, this will decrease the time needed to give out this information. Where we used to have to answer a phone or a letter to communicate with partners and customers, they can now get the information directly from the extranet freeing up time for the organization's customers. Some data could even be directly integrated into the intranets of business partners.