Best Management Principles for Designing an Intranet Project

“We have outlined the important factors when designing an intranet for a medium-large organization in this blog for intranet managers. The examples provided are drawn from our experience working in a large financial services firm.”

When does your company need an intranet?

When it comes to business communication, current systems often fall short and can create frustrations that can no longer be ignored. It’s time to find an intranet solution that fits within our budget yet meets the needs of our company for years to come. Finding the right solution isn’t easy – but with a little effort, we can make sure we get what we need without breaking the bank.

These are some reasons why an intranet is a good investment, based on my previous work experiences:

• An increasing number of workers
• Increased employee turnover
• Restricted access to documents that would normally be shared
• Overflowing email inboxes
• Inadequate employee productivity
• Numerous business sites, remote employees, or third-party partners/contractors
• The requirement for enhanced security provisions
• Inappropriate internet usage jeopardizes corporate productivity.

Finding an intranet design that meets the needs of your business and allows employees to work more efficiently can be a difficult challenge. With the right solution, however, you can provide a user-friendly tool for managing internal processes and help reach specific goals.

How did we choose an intranet?

Once we identified the problems that our global financial services organization with over 1,500 employees faced, we began looking for an intranet solution to provide us with a knowledge management system, directory, and communications channel. We eventually found the right one – one that would solve all of our issues!

The most important intranet selection criteria

Evaluating and selecting intranet software can be complicated. When considering different options, it’s important to consider:

• Business needs
• Security and compliance requirements
• Compatibility with existing systems
• Due diligence
• Flexibility
• Nimbleness
• Maintenance capabilities
• Management processes

Take time to thoroughly assess each option to make sure you pick the best one for your situation.

This is the procedure we followed while planning and selecting our intranet solution.

Each business unit’s analysis

Our business development team recognized that they needed an efficient customer relationship tool to understand our clients’ needs better. They worked together to find a solution that would improve their productivity and effectiveness. With the right technology in place, they can now quickly and easily access valuable customer insights, allowing them to provide superior service with less effort.

Compliance and security protocols

We need to make sure our communication process is secure. To do this, we’ve established permission levels for documents and real-time responses for requests or changes in access or employment. This ensures misuse of the system is flagged and reported immediately. In a big company, it’s especially important to have a security system that protects confidential information from fraud or abuse. If we don’t have the right protections in place, regulators could show up at our door – so it’s essential to put safety measures & protocols in place now before it’s too late.

Compatibility with others

As part of our checklist, we made sure that our intranet was connected to our financials system. This connection allowed project teams to access real-time and accurate financial information whenever they needed it. Having a stand-alone intranet would have been much more limited for us.

Due Diligence

Finding the right document can be a huge challenge. Searching for keywords in filenames and content within documents and spreadsheets can help make that process easier. With a good intranet system, you should be able to quickly search for information or data you need – all in US English! No more spending hours trying to locate something – type in what you’re looking for and get your results fast.

Flexibility

The system will be used by business units located around the world, from offices to remote areas, and even employees working from home. It must provide flexible mapping so that it can intelligently manage permissions for different people and topics. This means allowing access to certain information while restricting access to others. The system needs to also have the capability to quickly modify these permissions if needed.

Nimbleness

In order to respond quickly and appropriately to management requests or external sources, we have established a folder that contains all the approved images of our staff in the right format and size. This ensures that our image usage is monitored so that our external visual profile remains consistent.

Simplicity

Having an organized taxonomy is important because different people often have different ways of filing information. This can lead to multiple copies of the same document being saved in various folders, which makes it difficult to manage the size of your intranet. By doing this, you can make sure that everyone knows where to find the right files and make sure that your intranet remains neat and tidy!

Maintenance

As businesses become increasingly complex, it’s important to ensure that information is kept up-to-date and stored in one central place. That way, everyone has access to the same data and there’s no risk of silos being created where each business unit has its own separate set of knowledge. Keeping things organized helps us maintain a consistent level of quality and accuracy across the board.

Management

Managing the size of an intranet can be tricky, especially when it comes to documents. To ensure everyone is referencing the correct version, you need to make sure old versions are deleted and only the final, approved version is available. That way, there won’t be any confusion or discrepancies.

Committed to continuous intranet improvement

Having an intranet is essential for any business to succeed. It needs to be monitored, managed, and maintained in order to stay up-to-date and useful. If neglected, it can lead to costly problems down the road. This will help ensure your intranet remains one of the most valuable tools for your organization.

Summary

As an intranet manager, it’s time to take control and make sure your business units are running as efficiently as possible. It’s up to you to identify their key needs and develop solutions that will help them collaborate better and reach their goals. The intranet system you choose should give each unit the features and content they need to be successful, so everyone can work together productively and achieve success.