Intranet Insights

There are numerous ways in which an intranet can provide tangible value to your organization. Be sure to partner with your finance team early in the process to ensure you have both their input into your assumptions, as well as their knowledge of the various budgets that might be affected by the addition of an intranet.

Since your intranet will never be a profit centre, showing that it will offer substantial operational savings is the key to justifying the cost of implementing and running it. You will generally be competing for scarce funds with customer-facing initiatives, so do your homework and build a solid case.

Here are some ideas. Mix and match to align with your own business:

• Reduced HR headcount through self-service: This can be a touchy one, particularly if Human Resources are key stakeholders in your intranet initiative. On the other hand, if the head of HR is your executive sponsor this may resonate. If HR has a recent history of growth, you may be able to derive ROI through elimination of the need for new hires: Make the existing team more productive – and your data more accurate – by providing users with tools to manage their own information.
• Access to timely information for all: Time saved by not having to search through miscellaneous out-of-date repositories of information. Validate your assumptions – average time saved per person, loaded cost per employee etc. – with the bean counters early in the process. Ultimately, the benefit here is one of higher productivity: You will either have to show lower growth in the size of the workforce (very difficult to measure) or specific, measurable improvements in people’s ability to serve or sell to customers.
• Reduced IT spend: Engineer your intranet so that it provides a common UI for all new internal application development. That way the UI design and usability portion of subsequent web application projects can be reduced or eliminated.
• The Motherhood appeal: Intranet is now assumed to be part of the basic information landscape of any progressive enterprise, as substantial benefits have long since been proven out. Strictly speaking, this does not represent measurable ROI, however some decision makers
• Pilot project: I have had great success by choosing a call centre pain point as the initial driver for an intranet. Call centres tend to have large numbers of employees (hence large multiplier of any benefits), as well as excellent stats. Typically, if your intranet proposal can reduce average call handle time by even a few seconds, you will easily justify the cost.

Regardless of how you prove the value of a new or improved intranet in your enterprise, putting in place the means to measure both costs and benefits in dollar terms will be critical to your success. Not to mention helping secure access to funding for future phases.