Here are some benefits of using an Intranet:
• Employee communication—With an Intranet in place, it has become easy for organizations to communicate with their employees. This can be a strategic move, customer appreciation, new customer wins, leadership views and opinions, company profit and loss, organizational objectives, or links to other organizational platforms. The Intranet is also used to share knowledge so that it can create awareness and keep employees well informed. Apart from being a strategic form of communication, Intranets are used to communicate campaigns, series of weekly or biweekly communications such as about technology, and employee empowerment communications, such as awareness on pollution, eco-friendly plastic, and global warming issues. Some organizations run polls and competitions using their Intranets.
• Communication in time—Intranets deliver
communication to employees at their convenience, which means whenever employees are in pursuit of the information, they can access it. Intranets do not send employee mass communications, as is done through email. Access to information available on the Intranet is solely in the hands of employees at their convenience.
Information available on the Intranet does not distract employees when they are busy with work by sending notifications or triggering updates.
• Improves employee productivity—Intranets provide access to application links that are vital for employees to perform their roles and responsibilities in the organization. The Intranet has vital business information that’s required by employees in their day-to-day work. For example, say you are working on a customer RFP and you need the number of SAP- based certified professionals and the quality standards achieved by your organization. This information is available on the Intranet whenever you need it. Logging in to the Intranet is simple as it usually synchronized with the corporate active directory and integrated with a sign-in mechanism. This means one single click and a one-time investment to enter the user name and password. Any employee can access the information.
Any employee who is part of the organization can access the Intranet without any special access request.
• Web publishing—Intranets are web-based platforms that can be accessed using URLs. With a web publishing mechanism, managing cumbersome corporate
knowledge has become less complex and access to it has become very easy. Using web technologies and hypermedia, employees can access organizational information such as HR policies and training videos.
They can process documents and download attachments, and this become possible using technologies such as Acrobat, Flash, and inline video players.
• Business operations and management—Intranets are used for developing and deploying business applications. Information such as the know-how of an application, upcoming changes, and downtime information is made available on the Intranet.
• Saves on costs—An Intranet is a cost-saving solution and to demonstrate let's look at a couple of examples. Say your organization must train its employees in ethics and compliance and the training video is around 1GB in size.
Imagine without an Intranet, every employee would be forced to download this video, consuming lots of Intranet bandwidth and local machine size. With an Intranet in place, such training videos, independent of size, can be made available. Another example is circulating employee code of conduct documents, which often undergo changes. Imagine without an Intranet in place, that the organization would be required to send each version of that document through email and employees again would be forced to download it multiple times. With an Intranet in place, you make this document available online and amend it whenever you need to.
• Create a common culture among employees—
Information available on the Intranet is unique. All employees who are part of the organization can access the same information. Even temporary workers, subcontractors, and interns can access the Intranet so that they can become part of the same employee culture. The Intranet is an umbrella that holds employees with company information.
• Augments collaboration—Information and knowledge available on the Intranet is used by employees in day- to- day work and this information is shared between employees. With integration in place, news or articles on the Intranet can be shared with other platforms. For example, news articles from SharePoint can be shared with Yammer and employees can discuss and exchange ideas and generate collaboration.
• Employee engagement—Modern Intranets provide two-way communication by means of surveys, polls, and voting features. With such features in place, employees can react to the information shared on the Intranet.
Some companies also provide discussion forum features in order for employees to discuss and provide feedback on the information made available on the Intranet.
• Built for a unique audience—In an organization, you have employees with experience from different backgrounds, such as Finance, Legal, Information Technology, Administration, and Human Resources.
• Quick updates—Information and knowledge made available on the Intranet has to undergo version changes due to business changes. After such business change, information and knowledge is updated and the most recent version is made available for end users. Modern Intranets also provide access to archive versions as well. Some communication on the Intranet is really fast. When there is heavy rainfall or snowfall and roads are blocked, the trains or metro are not functioning due to strikes and other major reasons, the Intranet helps you quickly publish such communication about these situations.