Getting the Most Out of Your Corporate Intranet

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on how some companies are utilizing (or under-utilizing) corporate intranets. You can read the whole article here if you have the time and a WSJ subscription. If not, here are the main takeaways.

THE NUMBERS:

• According to a study Forrester Research conducted in 2005, only 44 percent out of 2,000 business users could easily find what they wanted on their intranet.

• Accenture surveyed 1,000 managers of large companies in the U.S. and U.K. and found that 59% of them said that they miss useful info every day because they can't find it within their company.

Aflac

• The insurance company uses AquaLogic software from BEA of San Jose, California that allows employees to upload files and info to the intranet without much technical know how.
• Employees use the intranet to post action items, to-do lists, and FAQ lists for projects. They also use the intranet like an internal Craigslist where they post items for sale. The company also uses wikis to share tips and definitions for the acronyms used at Aflac.

• The oil company's intranet, which had several different sites, was flooded with duplicate and out of date info. Using a software program called Intranet Dashboard from Adweb Agency, Shell was able to consolidate its separate country sites into regional ones. Those were also organized under a single global corporate intranet.

• After consolidating its Asia-Pacific intranet, it reduced the amount of sites from 1,000 to 20. And it cut 212,000 pages on the region's intranet down to 30,000. Shell saved more than one million dollars in infrastructure and IT costs after the consolidation.

• Film Foundation needed a way to simplify how it worked on collaborative projects with employees all over the country. The nonprofit started using IBM's Lotus Connections, and on conference calls, employees can access the same files using the intranet, which eliminates the confusion of figuring out which version of a file everyone is looking at.

• Instead of long email chains, employees post ideas in an activity space. Emails can be recorded and tagged on the intranet so that they can become part of a project.