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Description of an Intranet

What is an Intranet?

An intranet is a private network that is contained within an enterprise. An intranet in general looks like the Internet but is only accessible by people within the organization. The general public cannot access the intranet. The main purpose of an intranet is to share company information and computing resources among employees. Think of the intranet as a self-contained community like a castle-city surrounded by a moat that protects the city from the outside. The city has a drawbridge for controlled flow of traffic in and out. Some companies choose to allow access of their intranet to certain customers, partners, suppliers, or others outside the organization. When they lower the drawbridge to grant this type of traffic, it is known as an extranet.

Most people and organizations inherently know and understand the value of telephone systems. In many ways, intranets are like telephones – they assist us in accomplishing mission-critical work all the time. An intranet can also be used to facilitate working in groups and for teleconferences. Increasingly, intranets are being used to deliver tools and applications such as collaboration or sophisticated corporate directories, sales and CRM tools, project management etc., to advance productivity. Intranets are also being used as culture change platforms. For example, large numbers of employees discussing key issues in an online forum could lead to new ideas.

Advantages of Intranets

• Workforce productivity: Intranets can help users to locate and view information faster and use applications relevant to their roles and responsibilities. Users can access data subject to security provisions - from anywhere within the company workstations, increasing employees’ ability to perform their jobs faster, more accurately, and with confidence that they have the right information. It also helps to improve the services provided to the users.



• Time: With intranets, organizations can make more information available to employees on a “pull” basis (i.e.: employees can link to relevant information at a time which suits them) rather than being inundated indiscriminately by emails.



• Communication: Intranets can serve as powerful tools for communication within an organization, vertically and horizontally. From a communications standpoint, intranets are useful to communicate strategic initiatives that have a global reach throughout the organization. The type of information that can easily be conveyed is the purpose of the initiative and what the initiative is aiming to achieve, who is driving the initiative, results achieved to date, and who to speak to for more information. By providing this information on the intranet, staff members have the opportunity to keep up-to-date with the strategic focus of the organization.
  Intranet publishing allows for ‘cumbersome’ corporate knowledge to be maintained and easily accessed throughout the company. Examples include: employee manuals, benefits documents, company policies, business standards, newsfeeds, and even training. Because each business unit can update the online copy of a document, the most recent version is always available to employees using the intranet.



• Business operations and management: Intranets are also being used as a platform for developing and deploying applications to support business operations and decisions across the internetworked enterprise.



• Cost-effective: Users can view information via the intranet rather than maintaining physical documents such as procedure manuals, internal phone lists and requisition forms.



• Promote common corporate culture: Every user is viewing the same information within the intranet.



• Enhance collaboration: With information easily accessible by all authorized users, teamwork is enabled.



• Cross-platform capability: Intranets are able to transcend operating system platforms (e.g. a Mac user and a Microsoft user can access the same data).

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