E-Business
Issue No. 5 - April/June 2002
Making your Intranet Work for You
by John Goslino
The corporate intranet is being touted as the best way to communicate with employees, share important information and conduct transactions.
Staff empowerment, increased collaboration and productivity, reducing conventional training costs and streamlined personnel administration are some of the key drivers and objectives.
Most medium and larger organisations have intranets and or enterprise portals, but a recent Australian report suggests that the investment often does not provide a return — more than 80% of Australian business intranet investments are either lying dormant or are not being used to their full potential.
The major stumbling block seems to be when the responsibility for updating the intranet falls to one person or department, fewer other staff use the intranet to share information. In our experience, this is quite common.
The main reasons organisations do not use their intranet include:
- Little or no training for staff to use the technology (only a little should be needed).
- Older IT technology with limited functionality.
- Lack of integration with other systems.
- Reluctance to share potentially sensitive information – much remaining in departmentalsilos, or distributed via email, rather than being uploaded to the intranet for everyone’s benefit.
Intranet design must begin with understanding what users want and need to accomplish. Most organizations launch into intranet design with company goals a...
