INTRANETS: WHAT'S THE BOTTOM LINE? PART 1
By Randy Hinrichs
Intranets: What's the Bottom Line?
Organizational intelligence
An Intranet is an internal information system based on Internet technology, web services, TCP/IP, and HTTP communication protocols, and HTML publishing. Huh? The Intranet is a technology that permits your organization to define itself as a whole entity, a group, a family, where everyone knows their roles, and everyone is working on the improvement and health of the organization.
How do they do this?
By identifying and communicating missions, goals, processes, relationships, interactions, infrastructure, projects, schedules, budgets, and culture on-line, in a single interface everyone uses and can add value back to. In a word, an Intranet represents your organization's "intelligence". The purpose of this intelligence is to organize each individual's desktop with minimal cost, time and effort, to be more productive, more cost efficient, more timely, and more competitive.
Leveraging intelligence
Intranets are not about putting technology and software together. That's the easy part. In fact, you've probably got all the components in your organization already. Effectively building an Intranet is similar to building individual intelligence. It requires learning, applying the learning to practical decision making, acting on the intelligence with solid, clear tasks and responsibilities, modifying the learning for improved performance in the future, and making sure all of this is communicated all of the time to everyone. This book is about using the Intranet to leverage your organization's intelligence.
Single point of contact
The Intranet is the WAN/LAN, client/server, PC, UNIX, Apple computer stuff that you've been using all along in your organization to do your work, improve efficiency, and communicate with others. The problem, of course, is that the machines, software, and communication systems have been proprietary. You couldn't have internal communication of all data and information without a team of programmers and new software for every new cut on the information. With an Intranet, you have access to all the information, applications, data, knowledge, processes, etc. available in the same window, or the same browser. No more conversion to different formats, waiting for programmers to code all the "new systems" together, or teams of consultants to sift through your processes. No more missed opportunities, giving up and not doing business with someone, because their technology was different. Instead, an Intranet connects people together, with Internet technology, using web servers, web browsers, and your data warehouses in a single view that everyone can easily learn while still using their old software.
Organizational focus
The Intranet is your opportunity to define your organization and display it for everyone to see. If everyone knows what the company stands for, what the company's strategic vision is, what the guiding company principles are, who the clients and partners are, then they can focus more clearly on what their own contributions are to the organization. A clear, single web page representing the values of the company is tantamount to success. Every organization can constantly refer to the central messages and develop their own supporting sites accordingly. Use the Web as an information, communications, and project-management tool across the organization
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