E-Business
Issue No. 7 - October/November 2002
Intranets and Content Management
by John Goslino
The corporate intranet has been promoted as the best way to communicate with employees, allowing them to access needed information and conduct transactions. Staff empowerment, 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 an intranet or enterprise portal, but a recent Australian report suggests that the investment is often not providing a return. More than 80% of Australian business intranet investments are either lying dormant or are not being used to their full potential.
It seems to be that when 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.
According to the research (please ask us for more details about it), the main reasons organisations do not use their intranet include:
- Little or no training for staff to use the technology (although little should really be needed).
- Older technology with limited functionality.
- Lack of integration with other systems.
- Reluctance to share potentially sensitive information – much remaining in departmental silos, or distributed via e-mail, rather than being uploaded to the intranet for everyone’s benefit.
Intranet design must begin with understanding what site visitors want and need to accomplish. Most organizations launch into intranet design with company goals as the focus. But, making the site useful to the employees and partners needs to come first. If users don’t gain immediate value from an intranet, they won’t use it.
Finding the common ground in the user and business goals is the key, and once those goals are defined, it is relatively easy to determine what information is required for the site, what other systems need to be integrated, and who needs to be involved in con...
