The Benefit of Intranets

Most of the people that happen on to this site are either students or web designers/developers. This entry isn't for you. This is for you intranet newbies that still don't know why intranets are important.

First, let's start with the low-hanging fruit. Employee data is about as easy as it gets. If you have more than a handful of employees, and there is frequently a need for one employee to contact another one either by phone, email, instant message, or in person, then having employee contact information on an intranet would be a big time-saver. There's also the added benefit of viewing subordinates, supervisors, and titles for an individual, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Next, there's spreadsheets. Twenty years ago this was cutting edge technology. Now, that same information that gets captured in Excel can be put on the web and updated instantaneously. Instead of passing spreadsheets from person-to-person, the data can be captured in a website where anyone needing to review or update the information, can. There are still companies out there that expect to pass information back and forth using spreadsheet documents. In the case where a spreadsheet document requires information from multiple people, the time required to fill it out is multiplied. A web-based version of the same document, is accessible by everyone all the time. This means decisions and reports can be made much faster. What used to take weeks can now take a day.

I can go on and on about this stuff for pages, but I'll stop here. The company I work for just got bought out by a company that I understand does not have a well-developed intranet. It's probably good for me since it's what I do for a living, but it's still spooky nonetheless.