By Ruben Canlas Jr., with Val Gonzales
Intranets became fashionable in the late 1990s, when the internet hype was very ripe. Today, after the frenzy has calmed down a bit, the intranet has matured enough for companies to use it as a key enabler for competitiveness.
And why not? A lot of the most admired companies today run successful intranets. These organizations know that the intranet can facilitate organizational learning. The following FAQs will help you understand intranets and give you an overview for preparing to build your company intranet. In the next issue, we shall discuss the nitty gritty of setting up your company intranet.
1. What is an intranet?
An intranet is a web site which is available only from within your company’s network. The prefix intra means inside or internal. In short, an intranet is an internal website.
Note that this means that only employees will be able to browse your intranet -- no one else outside the office can see the intranet.
2. Why should I have an intranet that is separate from my corporate website?
Corporate websites contain the company brochure, contact information, and customer support information – all these are open to the public. A corporate website is mostly involved with the company’s relationship to the outside world, so you can’t publish internal memos and documents in the corporate website.
This is where the intranet comes in handy. The intranet can be a repository of internal information: files, reports, minutes of meetings, training materials, news items, discussions, etc – information that is critical to your company that is not available to the public can be uploaded to the intranet. In becoming a central location for information, your intranet also becomes a venue for sharing information (see, Question 6, below)
3. What are the advantages of an intranet? Can’t I just rely on my old filing cabinets?
Your old filing cabinet of folders is still fine, but the intranet has certain advantages that make your operations more efficient and effective. For one, the intranet can be easily searched using a search engine. In your filing cabinet, you would have to go through each folder and review them meticulously. In the intranet, all you need is to type a few keywords in the search box and the search engine will search the files for you.
Moreover, electronic files can be easily copy-pasted and this in turn reduces the amount of retyping. With this in mind, you can share templates, proposals, reports, and other documents. Employees can use these templates and documents and learn while using them.
4. Can an intranet assist me in managing company documents?
Yes. One company we consulted for had the typical electronic documentation problem: too many versions and copies of the same document were circulating. Which copy was final?
It got worst. Whenever a hardcopy of the document was printed out, the electronic file was forgotten. As time passed, these valuable files disappeared in the deluge of electronic information. When a 90-page report was badly needed, a massive hunt was done.Sometimes the secretaries found it easier to retype the whole document!
When we built an intranet for this organization, we gave them a section for electronic files, organized according to their own classification system. All the final versions of electronic files had to be uploaded in this section.
As a result, employees, especially new ones, merely had to be told to visit the intranet to store and find files. Moreover, we gave them a search engine that greatly speeded up the hunt for specific documents.
You can make your intranet the single, authoritative source of documents. Employees need only visit the intranet to get the latest version of a document. When a document like the Operations Manual is updated, you can simply notify all employees to check the intranet for the latest version.
5. How can an intranet serve as a tool for group collaboration?
If you’re familiar with Yahoo! Groups, you’ll understand why an intranet is a great way for people to work together. The intranet can be a venue to publish information and solicit comments. It reduces meeting time and paperwork.
One of our clients had the following problem. The company relied heavily on the Management Calendar, which changed frequently, sometimes as often as several within a day. To make matters worse, most of the Calendar entries required negotiations via phone calls and face-to-face discussions with various persons.
You can imagine the poor secretary’s stress: every time a change occurred, she had to update the calendar, print it out and send it to each department. She was always swamped with phone calls from departments, asking her for the latest changes to the Calendar. To complicate things further, the Calendar was actually an aggregation of three different files in various file formats.
To help allevite her life, we created an online version of the Management Calendar in their intranet. The secretary merely had to open a web form where she would enter the Calendar entries. Everyone could view the Calendar online. Staff with the right passwords could also view restricted information and book their own events on the Calendar.
Thanks to this, departments now only had to visit the intranet and check the online Calendar. The secretary now only needed to update one form. She could generate different report formats from there. This greatly reduced the number of phone calls and freed up the secretary’s time. Departments who needed printouts can simply print the Calendar themselves, using a Printable Version link.
6. I’ve heard that the intranet facilitates knowledge sharing and organizational learning. What does this mean?
The cases given above are all examples of basic knowledge sharing. There are other subtle but more ingenious ways that facilitate the this process and bring it to the level of organizational learning.
For example: different employees have different styles of writing memos and reports. Imposing a standard for memos and reports is difficult, since we are talking about qualitative indicators. Posting well-written memos and reports in the intranet could serve as models that other employees can follow. Thus in using this information, the employees also learn a lot.
7. Where do we go from here?
The next step is to learn more about knowledge management and intranet technology. We will discuss these concepts in upcoming issues.
Our general advice would be to take lots of consultation, planning, feedback-gathering, and experimenting. Although there are emerging good practices in the process of building intranets, each intranet is unique to its company. Do NOT simply transplant the design and content of other intranets into yours. It is important to remember that you want to make the intranet a habit for the staff. Therefore an intranet that is irrelevant to them will not succeed.
For more information on intranets, here are a few links to check out:
The Complete Intranet Resource. This website contains a wealth of information on intranets, from the basics to advanced topics. http://www.intrack.com/intranet/
Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question. This is a study of 14 company intranets, discussing navigability, usability, etc. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021111.html
Intranet Procedures and Guidelines. This column from the Intranet Journal gives a sample Intranet Guideline that is actually used in companies. http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200102/it_02_14_01a.html
*** For more information, contact Digital Solutions at tech[at]digitalsolutions[dot]ph
