You’ve been tasked to source and deploy an intranet solution for your entire company. This is quite the undertaking – where do you start?
Trying to find and implement an intranet solution that will suit everyone’s tastes and requirements is inevitably going to be difficult. It’s important that you have a solid starting point to ensure you don’t get lost in the multitude of options available when selecting a solution for your business.
When establishing the objectives and requirements for your company intranet, there are three main questions that you should ask yourself: What problems do you hope to solve, who are the users of this system, and what do your users need?
By asking yourself these questions, you can really start to build and define your intranet requirements and long-term intranet goals, including those all-important social intranet requirements.
Defining who your intranet audience will be is a key principle for deciding which intranet solution is most appropriate for the business. Think about who is most likely to be using an intranet; will it be HR, project management, or the whole business? If an intranet needs to be used by multiple teams, it’s vital that you choose an intranet solution that is flexible in its features and will cater for differing end users, including top level management.
For example, intranet solutions like Claromentis offer a comprehensive knowledge sharing and internal communications platform which can support a wide range of departments, including project management, human resources, course administrators, process owners, and many more.
By narrowing down your audience segment, this will give your requirements much more focus, and allow you to explore the next steps of outlining your specific intranet requirements.
Now that you have identified who your users are, the next challenge is to define what they want from a social intranet software. This list will be long, so the best place to start is by prioritising which intranet functions are most important. Is it a knowledge management system, a place where employee engagement can take place, greater internal communication tools, easy access to company information, business process management, or e-learning courses?
Once you have a clearer idea of what is needed, you can tailor your new intranet options.
You know your audience, and you know what they want; but why do they want it?
Understanding the problems that deploying an intranet will solve will ensure that you choose an intranet provider who will deliver the relevant solutions tailored to those issues.
If your business processes and workflows are generating too much paperwork and need streamlining and automating, business process management software can do the arduous work for you, where manual processes can be transformed by online task management tools.
If you need a central repository to store your entire company’s documents, a version controlled DMS (document management system) allows you to organise and store those vital files and folders.
Your course administrators may need a more efficient way to keep track of users’ learning progress; a Learning Management System automatically audits users’ development, course management, and can be completely controlled online via a desktop solution or mobile device.
Once you can determine the answers to these three vital questions, you are left with a fantastic foundation of intranet requirements which can be built upon to find an intranet software platform that will truly suit your business goals and needs.