Improving business processes

Discover the value that an Intranet can bring to your organization

In a 2003 survey of business leaders by KPMG, 80% of respondents considered their company’s knowledge a strategic asset, and 78% believed that they would miss out on business opportunities by failing to successfully exploit their company’s available knowledge.

If you’re looking for a low-cost solution to simplify accessing and sharing your company’s information or knowledge, look no further than an intranet. An intranet can help to encourage communication and collaboration between employees, give employees working outside the office easy access to company information and quickly scale up to meet the demands of your growing business.

How it works
An intranet uses the same open communication standards as the public Internet, but is only available to authorized users, such as your company’s employees. In this private space, your employees can organize information, readily access that information, manage documents and collaborate on those documents in a browser-based environment.

With all of your data in a central repository, the most current and up-to-date information is available to any employee that needs it. Add a VPN to the equation, and you can make your intranet available to employees who work from home, at a remote location or while traveling for business.

To help provide the security of external connections, and safeguard your intranet, a firewall and a VPN should be implemented. Firewall and VPN services can help protect your critical business information. Covad offers firewall and VPN services; see our web site for more information on TeleDefend VPN/Firewall.

The value of an intranet
Building a company intranet can offer many benefits to your business. It’s a great tool for eliminating wasted time and effort spent duplicating work or trying to find information, while creating opportunities for improved collaboration and productivity.

Because an intranet uses the same open standards as the Internet, it’s easy to use and highly scaleable to keep up with the growth of your company. Those open standards also mean that you can connect across disparate platforms. If you use a Windows platform at the office but use a Mac at home, you’ll still be able to see your intranet when you’re connecting from home.

An intranet can also help reduce your paper costs, especially if you regularly produce printed sales or marketing materials, employee contact information or pricing lists. By keeping the most up-to-date information on the intranet, employees can view and print what they need, when they need it. It can also help to eliminate the problem of version control of printed materials. It’s pretty clear—if it’s on the intranet, it is the latest.

You may also see a greater return on your IT investments with an intranet. Because an intranet uses a Web-based interface, it’s inexpensive to deploy compared to proprietary software alternatives. And the familiar Web interface requires little or no training to get employees up to speed on how to use your intranet.

These benefits are fueling a massive growth in the use of intranets, even in the smallest companies. It’s estimated that more than 90 percent of U.S. companies, including small businesses, have an intranet in some stage of evolution.

Making use of an intranet
For every business process or function in a company, there’s usually a way to streamline it by using an intranet. Following are some examples of the ways companies are using intranets:

Sales and marketing: Access to accurate information is crucial in the sales process. An intranet for sales and marketing could include:

• Price lists
• Product demonstrations
• Sales forecasts and reports
• Market research
• Press releases
• Competitor research
• Collateral and sales tools

Human resources: Even if you don’t have a dedicated HR department, you can use an intranet to keep employees up-to-date on HR-related information and issues, such as:

• Employee handbook
• Telephone/E-mail directory
• Benefits information
• 401K tracking
• Recruiting/job listings
• Newsletters

Customer service: Use an intranet to ensure that all of your customer service representatives have access to the same relevant and current information. As your company grows, you can extend this information to your Web site and allow customers to interact with your back-end systems (Covad’s SMART Account Manager is a good example of this). Intranet applications could include:

• Customer information entry
• Order entry and tracking
• Trouble ticket entry and tracking

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