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ARTICLES | Planning an Intranet
Strategy
An intranet by definition is a corporate communications
and collaboration platform that connects all the employees of a company
into a networked system and enables quick access to information of processes,
people and products of the enterprise.
In a more practical sense, it means many things to many
people. To some companies it is an important email communication system
that lets the employees communicate with each other within a company and
share mails and documents. To some more technologically exploitative and
brave companies, an Intranet is a means to share and transfer information
between different locations of the companies; a means for the enterprise
to build a solid knowledge bank about the companies policies, experiences,
documents, price charts, corporate presentations for all the employees
to access at a click of a button from no matter where in the world they
are; a means to effortlessly transact with their customers, suppliers
and vendors or even to run specific applications from a single server
throughout the organization.
To each of these forms of an Intranet, the world has attached
different names - Corporate Portal, Enterprise Information Portal,
Knowledge Management; however the essential goal or objective remains
the same at the heart of any of these forms - to increase productivity
and reduce costs!
Planning your Intranet - What are you looking
for in an Intranet?
The scope of an Intranet for any organization should be based on the
size of the enterprise (in terms of employees) and the intended objectives.
The objectives or goals of an Intranet are derived by scrupulously observing
the needs of the employees and carefully noting places of improvement
in productivity by cutting down on unnecessary time and saving on costs.
The objectives and goals so arrived are translated into the different
applications that are built into the intranet - intranet email, document
management systems etc.
However the scope has to be need-based to avoid spending
valuable resources on applications that no one uses. Moreover like any
critical business decision the need and scope of having an Intranet should
be backed by a clear vision and foresight. This helps in building an Intranet
that's not only useful but also scalable in a long run - it could be supporting
an increase in the number of employees working with the organization or
a geographical shift/ expansion in operations of the company.
So for a small company having offices centrally located,
the Intranet can comprise of document management systems that help employees
to access documents created by others quickly without wasting time in
their decision making and communication applications like chat modules
that help them communicate not only internally but also externally with
their customers/ partners. At the same time, for a big size company that's
multi located, it may need to incorporate collaborative features in its
Intranet where employees from different locations can work on a single
document at the same time
Selling to the management
At these initial stages, a more uphill task of selling the Intranet concept
to the management and various departments (for e.g. internal IS) takes
up a lot of time. While a corporate website is almost always seen as a
necessity and an asset as it is visible to the customers and the outside
world, an Intranet that is essentially seen by employees often receives
a cold shoulder or a step-motherly treatment. For this a proper business
plan outlining the goals, investments and benefits in clear quantifiable
terms is needed to convince everyone of the necessity of such an exercise.
It is important that the Intranet is looked upon more as an investment
in improving productivity and not merely an obligatory capital expense.
And this support and cooperation has to be sought throughout
the duration of the Intranet development and not just while funding it.
For the very same reason, it is always advisable to chalk out plans that
shall be executed and deployed in a period of 3-4 months. This is because
the people on the non technical and business side often get vary of waiting
for the product to roll out resulting in lack of active support but cooperate
better when the results start to show in a relatively lesser amount of
time.
Defining Teams
Once the management approval is obtained the next important task is to
form (small) teams define tasks for each team and team member. Here a
typical hierarchy could be where there are 3 (small) teams who individually
take up:
1. Deciding and managing the top-level architecture
2. Content development
3. Design and development (web design as well as programming different
modules)
A project manager who interacts and works closely with the
respective heads of different teams monitors the overall Intranet activity
and liaisons between the Intranet development group and the management.
It is also the time to do a 'make or buy' decision for the different parts
and modules of the Intranet. Usually a company finds that its internal
IS department is not equipped to handle certain activities (say database
management programming for example) in which case the group may decide
to go in for licensing third party systems to integrate in their Intranet.
In fact organizations also outsource parts of their Intranet to different
vendors and consolidate them in house (or even ask a vendor to do it).
It is a matter of separate discussion whether or not to outsource to different
vendors or maintain a single vendor to do all the modules, but it usually
depends on the size and scope of these individual modules in the Intranet
and the relevant experience of these different vendors in those fields.
Another important aspect that companies miss out occasionally
is to hire professional content writers to compile pages of the Intranet.
It's not enough to have technical strong Intranets and put up mere corporate
policies and brochures that one finds in the company's reception desk.
This information stored on the Intranet has to be used by employees to
make day-to-day decisions so it has to be presented in a very apt fashion
and written in a clear concise manner. And this is well done by professional
content writers.
Cost estimation
Intranets should be looked upon as necessary investments and not an obligatory
expense. This being so, it is highly important to measure the startup
and ongoing costs that are incurred while development of an Intranet and
for managing it. It is seen that after an Intranet is setup and running
80% of the budgeted costs annually go towards the maintenance of the Intranet
than in building new features and facilities. While this remains more
a concern of the Intranet development and maintenance group to manage
the Intranet well and train the employees effectively, it should be noted
that maintenance takes up as much as if not less costs as compared to
its development.
Actual development
Depending on the 'make or buy' decision of an organization, the Intranet
development group faces tasks from actual development to monitoring and
coordinating with vendors. Whatever the tasks faced by the team there
are a couple of principles that should not be ignored in the development
of the Intranet.
Phase wise development
Generally if an Intranet system is planned to cover lot of areas and modules,
it is advisable to perform phase wise development of the work. This makes
sure that the teams get to work together on smaller tasks one by one than
working on one huge project, complications are reduced to one particular
module that is being developed, mistakes or errors faced initially are
helpful in developing later modules and lastly because the company gets
to see something tangible in a shorter span of time, the motivation and
encouragement levels increase boosting the Intranet development activity
and giving it a unified welcome throughout the organization.
Pay attention to design & usability standards
While having a scalable and strong database design and good programming
principles will help in quick retrieval of desired information over the
Intranet, having a good thought-over design is of prime importance for
the success of an Intranet. Employees should be able to find the relevant
information quickly and properly. While normal usual design principles
help in making a design look aesthetically pleasant, the design also should
be created keeping in mind the usability factors. One of the easiest ways
of finding whether an Intranet is successful or not is by seeing how much
time employees spend on it. However the time spent better not be only
in unsuccessfully finding some piece of vital information or the popularity
of the Intranet wont last for long.
Who's going to use it?
The design and programming should also consider the users of the system.
For example Intranets that are run within a specific premises can afford
to run heavy applications on their servers but these days Intranets are
also increasingly used by the field staff using their mobile devices towards
which such Intranets may not be 'compatible' -worse a badly designed Intranet
would be very displeasingly used by the sales staff if they have to type
away for eternity to get some product information or download a new price
list.
Have Content development system at hand
Often it is useful to have a good content development system incorporated
in the Intranet as it enables quickly adding information pages by people
who are not well versed with technical aspects and lets them concentrate
only on getting the message across and not worrying whether it will work
on different browsers or things like that.
Deployment
You have done all the hard work! You set up different teams, you got approval
from your bosses and approved the budget too. The development of the Intranet
was completed and everything is now in place and the exercise finishes.
Far from truth! The real test begins when the company starts using the
Intranet for its day-to-day activities. For the transition to go smooth,
proper training has to be given throughout the company to different levels
of users and their feedback had. As much as proper designing and programming
is essential to get the Intranet running well, prompt support systems
and communication mechanisms for users to communicate problems, errors
is essential for it to survive.
Basically the 'marketing' of the Intranet in the company
starts well before its implementation and deployment. The different levels
of users have different levels of involvement and interest that has to
be kept alive with proper communication about the Intranet and its features,
benefits, requesting suggestions - and responding to them promptly. The
Intranet is meant to grow as it is used by employees to share and create
knowledge within themselves in the organization. For this they have to
be a part of the deployment process more than anything else.
Epilogue
An intranet project never ends - it should never end as a matter of fact.
An evolving and constantly growing Intranet signifies the addition in
the knowledge base and value that its employees derive from the organization,
from each other and which they pass on to customers, partners, and vendors.
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