Why your Business Needs an Intranet

One thing I like about running a small company is the ability to act quickly.
Decisions are not bogged down by layers of management. In fact, most moves are made with the interested parties meeting around a table.
But there can come a point when your business outgrows this arrangement. You need constant, reliable and secure communications with others in the company to ensure successful growth. You need an intranet.
An intranet is similar to a website, and it uses internet protocols, but it's an internal network exclusive to one company. (An "extranet" also is an internal or private website, but access privileges are extended to designated customers, partners and/or others.)
Most large corporations use intranets. Information distribution is a huge task when you have 10,000 or more employees. Intranets can help cure that headache.
Your business probably has nowhere near 10,000 employees. But I can give you three major reasons why your small business should invest in an intranet:

1. Communication Suffers When Dealing With More Than One Person
Even a very small company has communication issues. Most people find out what's happening while gossiping around the coffee pot. Stories change as they spread, leading to a misinformed and disgruntled staff. If you have telecommuters, off-site workers, employees who travel a lot or a "virtual" company, communication issues become even more challenging.
In order for a company to succeed, everyone must understand its goals. Neither long- nor short-term goals should be confined to upper management meetings.
An intranet is the perfect place to post weekly reports, memos and goals. This way, everyone is up to speed.
Toby Ward, president of the intranet consulting firm Prescient Digital Media, notes that even a company with few employees benefits from an intranet. Even if you don't have people working remotely, your sales staffers or consultants aren't always in the office.
Building an intranet can enhance communication through message boards, instant messaging and moderated chats.
Let's take a typical business scenario. Your three sales staff have to come up with a presentation on increasing sales in the next fiscal year.
They enter a conference room, eat pizza, drink coffee and talk for hours. The first meeting turns into a three-hour, brainstorming session. The second meeting starts with a review of the best ideas from the first. The participants hash out why they will or will not work. By the third or fourth meeting they have some definite proposals.
By using an intranet's discussion board in the days before the meetings the process could have been improved. Ideas could be debated beforehand. Participants could have come into the sales meeting more focused.

2. Time Is Money
An intranet allows you to post critical information for all employees to see. Even having human resources information posted is valuable. One of my employees said workers in his former office once spent 45 minutes trying to find out if public holidays were paid. The personnel manager was gone and no one else knew.
Posting of calendars, company policies and benefits is a great start. They reduce wasted time. But the interactivity of an intranet means it can be used for more than basic information.
You can save time (and paper) with interactive forms. Vacation requests, supply orders, changes to benefits and more can be handled quickly and efficiently.
Make sure your intranet follows good design principles. Make it as user-friendly as possible. You're trying to save time, not frustrate people.

3. It's Better Than E-Mail
You may be thinking, "Why not just email the form?" Or, "I communicate well with my employees already”.
According to Ward, e-mailing multiple versions of the same document or presentation leads to confusion and sometimes information overload.
Let's take that same sales group we envisioned earlier. They've decided on three major ways they will increase sales. They are now working on a PowerPoint presentation.
Three people collaborating on one PowerPoint file can lead to disastrous results. Confusion over who's working on what can lead to one person's work being overwritten by another.

By using an intranet, people can work on a shared file and have a central location for the most recent version.

Getting Started
Before you set up an intranet, make sure you understand what you want it to do. Understand how employees will use it. Finally, adhere to good design principles. If it takes five or six clicks to find a particular request form, it's too complex.
You'll also have to decide if you want to build your own solution. A consultant can build an intranet to your specifications. It will have the look and feel you specify.
Software packages such as Windows SharePoint Services allow you to customise and design most everything yourself, using someone else's template. Windows SharePoint Services is provided as part of the Windows Server 2003 operating system. It lets team members post files, participate in discussions, link to web content and update announcements. And because Microsoft Office 2003 applications tie directly into the system, Word documents can be shared - without ever leaving Microsoft Word - and workers can chat from within applications.

The Downside

To get your intranet ready for employee use, you will need someone to develop and maintain the content. The idea is to have continually updated information available. How you delegate those tasks may depend on the size of your company. If you only have 10 people, one person may be sufficient to maintain the information.
If you have a larger company, you'll probably want to separate content updates among departments. No matter the size, you'll have to budget maintenance time into an employee's schedule. Remember, we're dealing with computers; nothing ever runs as smoothly as we would like.
You'll also have to invest in time for employee training. You may even have to spend time convincing people to use the intranet. There's no point in spending cash if your employees aren't on board. But once they are, the return on investment can be significant.