The five pillars of enterprise intranets

Business Process 

All organisations rely on processes that define and structure what they do, whether completing a review, booking leave, creating a letter, creating a project or a myriad other functions.

Modern intranets provide tools for defining and embedding business processes; effectively the intranet creates new business applications to drive and monitor these processes. Such processes are often transparent to the users - perhaps they just fill in the Leave form, unaware that this then creates an alert for their line manager to review it whilst simultaneously showing the time in the team calendar.  Or perhaps they update a procedure which has been flagged as needing to be reviewed, which in turn ensures the organisations remains compliant with governance and legal obligations which are picked up by the corporate affairs manager, with the document metadata serving to flag information for retention policies and against FOI requests – multiple processes driven out of a single platform.

Intranet based processes are often simple and very quick to develop, avoiding months of coding by a developer thus allowing hundreds of minor processes to be subtly improved. Sometimes they are highly sophisticated, requiring custom workflow and interacting with line of business systems.

As a powerful intranet becomes more widely used other systems can be decommissioned; power users can build more solutions to their needs and processes can become agile enough to keep up with the needs of the business.

People

There is a subtle variation of a people intranet to that of a collaboration intranet.  People loosely refer to these as corporate social networks.  These types of intranets capture those mythical watercooler conversations that people have.  But what do you do when you have more than one mythical watercooler?  These types of intranet allow you to capture those conversations and share knowledge and experience where organisations are dispersed in more than one location, have staff that are field-based or not physically present.

The five pillars

By designing a strategy around the five pillars an intranet can emerge that is truly a strategic asset, one that revolutionises and improves the way a knowledge rich organisation can function, which  overcomes barriers based on location, organisation boundaries and outmoded approaches. The return on investment can be large and tangible. The subtle effects can be larger, in terms of flexible and agile processes, better ways working and staff who are enabled to get their jobs done.