Is your team frustrated with too many meetings, struggling to find the information they need to get their jobs done, and become increasingly disengaged? Then it's time to consider a new (or upgraded) intranet.

Intranets are central to a modernized digital workplace, and offer immense benefits to leaders, managers, employees, customers and everyone else who needs to work together to make your organization a success.

Intranet - Corporate Information Superhighway

These benefits can be boiled down into a single word – Collaboration.

Some of the more popular intranet solutions include SharePoint, Atlassian, and sitron to name just a few. The image below has a larger (although still incomplete) list.

The best intranet solutions SharePoint Atlassian sitecore sitrion tibbr opentext salesforce

If you’re considering an intranet, read on for the 6 benefits that most intranets solutions have to offer!

Want to build a better intranet? Click here to learn about the 2 day workshop.

1. CMS (Content Management System)

One of the most important benefits of an intranet is to get control of all that “stuff” – content - that is stored in so many different places.  That includes documents, images, videos, calendars, lists, blueprints, web pages, etc.  An intranet is the one place that users can store, find, and use content that they have created or that their coworkers have created.

Intranet content management CMS Web

Most intranets allow "co-authoring" of content - a faster way to develop documents and other content as a team without having to email attachments.

2. Collaboration and Social

"Social" - it's still a dirty word in many organizations.  But social collaboration within a business can offer a significant boost to productivity, to knowledge sharing, and to flattening an organization so that senior leaders can learn more from front-line employees faster than ever before.  Intranets offer one place for all of these things to occur, leading to greater efficiency and the ability to work together better.

3. Search

Harvard Business Review studies suggest that the average worker spends 20% of their time looking for what they need (content) so they can get their job done.  What a huge and frustrating waste of time!

Intranets are an important part of the solution to this problem.  Not only do they enable employees to search all of the content stored in the intranet, they can also sync with other data systems, enabling employees to have one place to search for everything.

No more searching your inbox, hard drive, dropbox, thumb drives, printed documents, filing cabinets, file shares and co-workers offices for what you need.

4. Business Process Automation

Most intranets also include flexible tools for process automation.  This includes capturing data into forms, routing the information, handling internal document approvals, and sharing data with other internal systems. Most intranets have some easy-to-use tools that almost anyone can use to setup a basic list or email alert, more flexible tools that power users can adopt to automate more complex processes, and programming tools for developers.

5. Dashboards and Business Intelligence (BI)

Big data is forecast to have as big of an impact on the bottom-line in the next 20 years, as the internet has had in the past 20.  The best intranet solutions include business intelligence (BI) features to make it fast and easy to analyze large data sets. 

The result? Fewer places to search for important information, and more time spent working together to improve business metrics.

Intranet business intelligence BI dashboards

6. Team Sites, Communities and Portals

Everything listed above (and more) can be wrapped into different sites, communities and portals on an intranet.  Departments (such as sales, IT, marketing and HR) can have their own site.  Cross-functional teams can form sites around communities (such as workplace safety, employee onboarding, or R&D on a new product).  Imagine an KPI site that summarizes all critical metrics from across the organization in a single site, with each department having their own separate site that rolls up into that site.

 

Click here to learn about a 2 day workshop focused on building a better intranet.