Forget the customers for a moment. Let's focus inward. Your most valuable Web site may never show up in Google and may never be seen by anyone outside of your company. While your Web site may have a primary goal of driving revenue and it may do a magnificent job of facilitating business with customers, your corporate intranet should ensure that your company is running at peak efficiency.

A company's intranet often grows out of the needs of one or two departments and does not serve the entire organization. When this happens, the underlying architecture of the intranet may have trouble adapting to new feature requests, resulting in jumbled usability and/or lack of company-wide acceptance.

Therefore it is crucial to develop a strategy for any intranet development project. Remember, this is a true project that can produce real ROI. Treat it as such. This article will serve as a guideline for building a moneymaking Web site that your customers will never surf, but your employees cannot live without.

Ideas for Increasing Efficiency

The intranet should act as the employees' own personal assistant and, in short, save them time while performing their job role. The specific tasks that need to be optimized are specific to each organization, but here are some ideas that may apply to your organization. These ideas may be stand-alone systems that are accessed through your intranet or built directly upon your intranet's platform.

• The New File Server
  Intranets have advantages over file servers, because of true document management. A document management system within your intranet allows employees to search documents, check out documents, and manage document versions.
• Eliminate Documents – Better Than Paperless
  If your company phone book is managed as a spreadsheet or a Word document, it could be managed by the intranet as described above. But it could also become its own searchable database, or perhaps it could simply query a master HR database and completely eliminate the need for the document entirely.
• The Magic 8 Ball
  By organizing and storing questions and answers within the intranet, you've essentially built a searchable knowledge database that's ready to assist the stumped employee. These are often used for customer support groups.
• Trim The Expense of Expenses
  Paper-based expense reporting is time consuming and costly when compared to a Web-based system. Some companies have reported a 90% increase in efficiency by taking this task to the intranet.
• Perfect Presentations
  The intranet may not talk directly to customers, but it should equip the field sales force with the right information when they need it. Not only should it store important collateral, but it may also generate custom sales documents and presentations, complete with a prospect's company name and logo.
• A Trained Staff is an Efficient Staff
  Provide timely training materials for your staff or take it to the next level by incorporating a full learning management system, complete with Web-based courses, tests and certifications.

Understand ALL The Needs

The previous list of ideas is by no means exhaustive. It is meant as a primer for discussions around creating efficiencies within and between departments.

As mentioned, this is a project and should be run on a foundation of solid project management principles. Before you start making technology decisions, contacting software vendors, and making build/buy arguments, you need to ensure you have a deep understanding of your stakeholders and all of their needs. Here are some suggestions for getting the project started on the right path.

• Develop a brief mission statement that defines the general purpose of the intranet. This simple statement should not mention any specific functionality but only describe the purpose of the functionality. How you accomplish the mission is still to come. Think ROI. Some other key phrases that you may consider are “facilitate communication,” “support the sales/procurement/etc.,” and “equip employees with XYZ.”
• Meet with representatives from each department that will use the intranet. Hopefully this is all of your departments. Come equipped with your mission statement. Interview them about their day-to-day responsibilities and goals. Ask what is working for them and, of course, what are their sources of pain. Listen for what information they need to store, what needs to be communicated, and what true functional requirements will facilitate their tasks. Also ask about other computer systems or databases they may be using.
• Document and rank informational requirements and functional requirements by department. Ensure your requirements are sound by seeking buy-in from each department. This will go a long way in setting expectations for what will actually be delivered at rollout.

Minimize Usernames and Passwords

By definition, the intranet is only available to authenticated users – your employees. A prominent problem inherent to the growth of Web-based software tools is username and password management. Frustration abounds from employees who have a username for their intranet, a different username for their time reporting package, and yet a different username to access their Web-based email. This frustration may result in intranet abandonment.

Your intranet strategy should include an authentication strategy. You need to determine where the master username and passwords will reside. There is not a single best solution for this question, so start by taking an inventory of existing systems that require authentication and will be accessed through the intranet. Weigh these three factors in the following order.

1. Simplicity for the user – What username and password is the user most accustomed to?
2. Development simplicity/feasibility – How much development time will each approach require?
3. Technical manageability/risk – Are there too many processes that can fail?

You may find the best solution is authenticating against an existing Windows network, tying into an existing HR database, or creating a new user database with ties into other systems.

Adoption: The Final Hurdle

The best thing you can do to ensure habitual use of the intranet is to build it around the specific needs of the users. However, change is naturally resisted and it takes a little effort to alter work styles and form new habits. A little persuasion, gentle and blunt, should help to ensure company-wide adoption. Here are some suggestions to get your employees addicted to the Company Wide Web.

• Suggest (or enforce) that your intranet is each employee's browser home page
• Create formal procedures for each department, using various stakeholders as enforcers
• Where possible, cut off access to the old way of doing things

Your intranet can be as important to cost savings as your public Web site is to generating revenue. Set up a mission-critical project around your intranet development to maximize the success of your intranet and your return on investment. A strong strategy and well-executed project will benefit your employees who in turn will benefit your customers.

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