One of the conclusions from the recent “"Intranet Design Annual 2009” was the evidence of how integral intranets are to a company’s performance and growth. Intranets are no longer an “add-on” to other company systems, increasingly they have critical importance as the systems hub and are a fundamental business requirement, “...the top intranets have evolved well beyond simply hosting HR manuals and now play a recognised, strategic role in supporting work processes and increasing business efficiencies," (Kara Pernice, MD of Nielsen Norman Group.
Effectively structured and managed Intranets are now proving their worth in providing a competitive advantage and delivering a healthy return on investment. In the Intranet Design Annual 2009 is a case study that shows how after an Intranet redesign users can now complete tasks in an average time of 54 seconds, compared with a previous time of 1 minute 52 seconds. Consider their productivity over an hour - it is possible that they could do twice as many tasks as before!
Compare that with taking over 3 hours to find a document, thats the scenario one customer faced when they had to search through a series of public folders to find a document he needed to show a colleague. Their current system of publically accessible shared drives clearly wasn't working; hence their desire for a structured and efficient Intranet. There is one user who is looking forward to getting an Intranet that will save him at least 179 minutes!
Simply, the aim of an Intranet should be to help people do their jobs better and more efficiently. An Intranet can assist employee performance by delivering improvements in, communication, collaboration and business processes. The key is how to connect people to the information they need.
Intranets should be structured to support and encourage self-service so that users can get relevant, accurate and useable information quickly. There should be connections between content, connection between users to aid collaboration, collaborative tools to encourage user connection to the Intranet, connection between users and systems and processes, connections between users and company performance and objectives.
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2 comments:
Even for just ensuring basic information is available to employees, an intranet should be considered essential by most companies. Especially considering how cheap an out of the box system is nowadays, compare it to cellphone bills!
Stewart Higgins
Intranet Expert
Intranet Software
Nice blog! I enjoyed reading this article. I need to learn more on this subject.. Thanks for writing this nice post.. Anyway, I’m gonna subscribe to your rss feed and I hope you post again soon.
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