Employee Intranets in 2007
Collaboration, Business Processing and KPI Dashboards
Employee Intranets have been around for a few years, but these days they include collaboration, business intelligence and management dashboards to help employees work.
Most medium to large-sized companies have an intranet. They have been around for over 10 years and can provide a wealth of information to their employees. But there's more an intranet can do for an employee other than supplying them with policies and procedures. Intranets are fast becoming a collaboration environment and a rich interactive business intelligence tool. To learn some of the new functions of an employee intranet, read on.
Collaboration Tools
Need to share information with a team? Need a central location to store documents, assign tasks, and provide links to relevant information? The intranet is the place to go. Take advantage of your intranet to provide a central location for collaboration teams.
You can have things like discussion groups, wikis, blogs, share RSS feeds and other collaboration capabilities. Having a collaboration environment on your intranet enables you to ensure everyone has access (because everyone would have access to the intranet) and ensures the environment is fully secured and backed up.
Business Intelligence
Intranets can be used to provide important information to management. Dashboards can be created that display KPIs (key performance indicators) that management can easily review. It can also be a central location for reports, business plans, scorecards, and analyst reviews. You can provide different levels of dashboards depending on the user viewing the information (i.e. a CEO would have access to high level company wide information while a division manager would only see their own division).
Business Processes and On-line Forms
The intranet can provide access to a variety of forms that users can download, complete and send off. Or, it can provide that form in an online format. When a user completes the form, workflow can be kicked off that ensures certain business rules are followed. The user can view of the status of their request through the intranet as well. Another use of the intranet is providing an employee with the ability to change their basic profile information such as address, emergency contacts and direct deposit information.
The nice thing about using the intranet to provide online business process is that you can have the policies and procedures that go with that process in the same location, either as links to detailed articles, help context sensitive notes, or side-by-side commentary.
Security is Important
Of course if you are going to provide this type of capability through the intranet, then security becomes a critical piece that needs to be in place. Work to provide levels of security via profiles and audiences and not actual individuals. Profiles are groups of individuals with similar needs and access privileges. You create the group profile and then add/remove individuals as needed.
Take a look at your needs within the company for collaboration capabilities and business intelligence and use the intranet to provide this enhanced functionality to your employees.
