The Executive's Basic Guide to Intranets

2. What Can You Use an Intranet For?

Intranets can add value to an organization in a variety of ways from improving customer relationship management to automating and integrating mission-critical business processes. The key to an intranet is the ability to get information into the hands of people that need it the most, when they need it, so they can make better and quicker decisions. In this manner, enabling greater sharing of information and resources through intranets allows an organization to better align and integrate its applications with its business needs and objectives.

Because intranets are based on Internet technology, they are flexible and scaleable, which means they can be easily expanded and modified to address your organization's changing needs on an ongoing basis. By adding this technology to your existing information systems now, you can leverage your IT investments while greatly simplifying the process of updating and maintaining the enterprise going forward. And the benefits of a well-planned intranet show up almost immediately in the form of increased productivity and reduced costs.

For example, an intranet can be used to facilitate and enhance communication and collaboration among different departments or divisions of a company at a basic level, through the use of e-mail and the posting of information such as corporate news or employee benefits on an internal Web server. On a more sophisticated level, this can be accomplished through the use of groupware applications like whiteboarding, or videoconferencing. This combined with ability to leverage the public Internet as a low-cost method for providing remote access to corporate resources, can save both time and money by cutting down on the need for travel and frequent face-to-face meetings with employees who are in remote geographic locations. And as more and more employees choose to telecommute, these features will translate into even greater benefits for the corporation.

While the move towards a "paperless office" environment has been in the making for well over a decade now, the advent of intranets is now making this goal a reality. Through a combination of communications technologies, Web publishing tools, workgroup applications, and e-mail, organizations can significantly reduce the time and money spent on printing and manually distributing information, not to mention the overhead associated with managing and storing materials. Not only is this better for the environment, it also frees companies so they can focus their energy and resources on managing operations to better serve customers and business partners.

Perhaps even more significant is the ability to extend the intranet to conduct electronic commerce with both customers --via an external Web site-- and trusted business partners, suppliers, and vendors through extranets.

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