Why Your Organization Needs an Intranet (and What Can you Do with One)

September 10, 2009 | by Krystee Dryer | Posted in Web Development

There is a lot of information about the benefits of an intranet for your organization. You will quickly find with a couple of basic web searches that an intranet can serve many different purposes: communication, organization, or access. However, all of these purposes sum up to one large issue: TIME.

Whether you are a small non-profit group or a large scale trade show, an intranet saves you and your employees time (which of course translates – in some fashion – to money). Organizing your documents, information, data and other digital media in ways that can be found quickly by the resources that need it is a tremendous benefit that any organization can use. Your employees will not have to spend countless hours recreating something that has already been done before, but cannot be located. History about a project or client can be recorded and referenced not just in a file in an employee's office, but in an easily accessible manner that is both secure and simple. In addition, the effects of turnover in your organization can be mitigated by having a good intranet strategy and implementation. When an employee leaves, the knowledge, data and documents generated by that person can stay with your organization.

Now that you know why you need an intranet, the question that remains is: What can it do for you and your organization? Here are 10 ideas on how an intranet can transform the way you work. Your intranet can:

1. Allow documents to be stored with categories referencing type, clients, projects, subjects or any other type of classification your organization uses. Employees can filter the list by category and client to allow documents to be found in seconds.
2. Keep a project history with notes, files, documents and other information all in one place. When a new employee is given a task for a project, they can look at what was done before and where issues have been found previously. This saves both the employee and the project manager time by not having to locate information from other team members.
3. Limit information access to only those who need it and keep other information away from people that don't. This adds another layer of security in your organization and keeps access at an appropriate level.
4. Allow clients a secure portal to view items they need to approve. Team members working on that project will know instantly when approval items are ready.
5. Encourage collaboration within teams by creating team portals for items like knowledge bases, wikis, files, forums and industry news.  You can allow team members to post an issue to the portal and others to connect with solutions.
6. Provide issue tracking or quality assurance interactive lists for project milestones, completions and maintenance to allow team members to know at any time what items are outstanding.
7. Provide individual employee portals to keep track of their own projects, contact information, meeting schedules and more.
8. Create an organization calendar to track internal meetings and events. This calendar can be presented on project, team, user and/or client portals.
9. Allow internal surveys or polls to be presented to your employees to gather vital information about current or new policies or other important topics in a quick and easy fashion.
10. Instigate a file versioning policy in your organization to track changes and eliminate time-consuming overwriting problems with team collaborations on files.

All of these ideas can increase the efficiency and collaboration of your team members and can make project work and management a more streamlined and efficient process, which will in turn save time.