Impact of Corporate Intranets

Business processes that tend to be dramatically improved through the implementation of an intranet garnering the most value share certain characteristics:

  • Any business process that involves the production, requisition, distribution and update of dynamic information that has traditionally been published on paper. Examples include employee directories, medical benefits descriptions, product specifications, user manuals, price lists, marketing collateral, financial reporting systems, and policies and procedures.

  • Any business process that involves the consolidation of information from multiple data sources. For example, a retail customer service representative must access and consolidate customer information, order history and product information (description, pricing, availability) and enter sales order information - all while speaking to a customer on the telephone.

  • Any business process that requires a high level of communication and collaboration between people, especially if they are separated geographically. Today, for example, many engineering projects involve the coordination of multiple development groups scattered in multiple locations. Many companies have field sales offices that need constant, up-to-date access to company information as well as daily contact with the home office.

  • Any business process that depends on people finding or requisitioning information or products. Examples include reference manuals, internal requisition systems, channel distribution order systems and fax-back systems.

  • Any business process that needs to be brought up-to-date. They may currently be automated by a legacy client-server or mainframe application. This is particularly significant for companies with older legacy systems.

The key words listed above in identifying characteristics of an intranet are “Any business process”. Development and deployment of an intranet can be an easy avenue to perform business process improvement. So now that we’ve identified how to recognize content for the intranet the possibilities should look extensive.

To initially keep things simple, it will be easiest to identify content and process by functional department or business groups. An initial focus on Sales and Marketing, Human Resources, Engineering, Customer Service and Support, Finance and Accounting, and Manufacturing and Operations should provide an extensive list of opportunities to launch your intranet.

Not to leave out Information Systems and Technology, there are valuable benefits for them too. The point is that a corporate intranet is not an IT solution, it is a business solution and representation from the business community is required for the development and deployment of a successful corporate intranet.

No one measures the return on investment of their telephone phone system since they understand its inherent value. The same may be said of intranets since, as stated earlier, intranets assist us in accomplishing mission critical work all the time.