Companies with multiple office locations or with staff that regularly work in the field often face significant communications challenges. That can be costly on two fronts: Poor communication wastes people’s time, and poor communication can lead to a lack of knowledge among your staff – which translates into missed opportunities.
Through our work with clients such as Briggs & Stratton, Ziegler, AIG Life Brokerage and Ministry Health Care, we’ve seen that effective intranets can provide tremendous cost savings, in some cases in the millions of dollars. Those savings can now scale to smaller organizations due to more efficient use of web and database technology.
Document management is a big problem for many companies. That’s especially true in heavily regulated lines of business such as financial services, where it’s essential to have accurate and current documents.
Such companies increasingly rely on intranets as highly efficient avenues to communicate with their staffs and to ensure that the most current and relative documents are in the hands of people who need them.
An intranet is not only an efficient way to access current documents, it can also be proactive by informing certain groups of people that updated versions of documents are available.
Studies have shown the costs of bad document management, and the benefits that good intranets offer.
Earlier this year, an Accenture study of 1,000 middle managers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom found they spend up to two hours each day searching for documents that, when found, prove of no value to them. Only half of all managers responding to the study said their companies do a good job of governing information distribution or have established adequate processes to determine what data each part of an organization needs.
Another study, the Norman Nielson Group’s Usability Return on Investment, found that productivity gains could be realized in the millions of dollars annually for large corporations that make their intranets easier to use.
IBM estimated that it realizes savings of $1,000 per employee per year due to efficiencies provided by its intranets. The company reports that 80 percent of its employees access its intranet daily, and that 68 percent of its employees view the intranet as crucial to their jobs.
Even in small and midsize companies, significant savings can be found through the productivity gains offered by intranets. Industry insiders say that intranets become true communications and productivity enhancers for companies with 30 employees or more.
Wisconsin companies are using intranets to connect everyone from the receptionist to the CEO. Sites can include message centers for secure internal communications, and allow communications to be corporate-wide or department-focused.
Message centers on intranets can take the load off of company e-mail systems. Instead of sending an “everyone e-mail,” you can post messages to specific departments or at certain levels of management or staff.
Additionally, because intranets can be secured to prevent outside access, message centers can become acceptable means of distributing sensitive documents. Security elements also can allow intranets to be accessed from remotes, such as client offices of home offices.
Security is especially crucial to companies that work under stringent government regulations. That security is not just to prevent outsiders from gaining access to sensitive and proprietary information, it’s also to keep information within the right hands internally. An information hierarchy can be set up so only certain people within an organization can access a document.
While intranets can be powerful and serious business tools, they don’t have to be staid and dull. The best intranets allow each user to personalize their start pages, selecting favorite links and adding features they find interesting or useful to their particular jobs.
Personalization is one of the keys to good intranet usability. Employees are more productive when they can tailor their intranet home pages to include the information they really need.
Many intranets are ineffective due to a failure to adequately take the end user into account. A good intranet should not only include information an employee needs but also information that employees find interesting.
“Magnet applications” are also highly effective in getting employees to buy into intranet usage. Those include simple things like quote of the day, question/survey of the day, photo of the day, cafeteria menus and employee classified ads. Those applications can be included as widgets, allowing employees to easily tailor their home pages.
Include “killer applications,” that add productivity and value to the intranet. Those could be a corporate calendar, a suggestion forum, a search tool, time-entry, an e-learning video library or a document rating system. At IBM, 52 percent of employee training is delivered on the web.
Search tools are extremely important for efficiency, as the Accenture study pointed out. If you only have the budget to add one powerful item to your intranet, make sure that is a good search tool.
A good intranet is like a good library. It should be organized to help you easily find what you’re looking for. Your company has a base of knowledge; an intranet is a great place to store that knowledge and make it readily available to your staff.
That on-demand availability is seen as another cost benefit provided by intranets. When documents are readily available online, they can be printed on demand. That can eliminate or reduce the need to print and store large quantities of documents that at some point will become outdated and useless.
