Corporate management and communication

In corporate management andcommunication, intranet has won mileage and has become a hero, dazzling on the covers of business magazines and is currently the leading panel of discussions at business conferences. I can confidently say that, the only thing that it can’t do is to make a cup of coffee. To everyone who has usedtechnologyit is clear that the technology intranet offers a tremendous and very useful management tool for every organization in whatever capacity, in terms of communication, collaboration and knowledge building tool that creates a new and more efficient way of doing business and getting information.

However, selling the benefits to senior management who do not have “ hands on” experience can be very difficult at times (www. intrack. com). The management will get the following advantages by having intranet as part of its management tool; it is cost saving; many organizations strive to reduce the operating costs in order to deal with a highly competitive and global market, this is the starting justification of intranets, it decreases the costs of producing, accessing and distributing information within an organization.

It is estimated that nearly 18% of corporate and organization printed materials become outdated within thirty days, but printed and mailed documents like internal phonebooks, policy and training manuals, requisition forms and other materials can be saved on the internal web server and can be updated for a small fraction of the cost of reprinting the material. At the same time, it allows information to be quickly and economically distributed to a group of employees. Access to information is fast and cost saving (www. jmir. org).

Intranet increases productivity of an organization since there is fast, more rapid exchange of information, this means more productivity. There is allowance for flexibility and time delivery of information for instance training materials can be made through intranet to the desktop or a PC, and employees can be easily schedule training during lull times, instead of interruptions during the key projects. The benefits from increased productivity cannot be measured to the savings made from the reduced cost of printing and distributing manuals.

Even businesses that budget, track and bill employee time in hourly increments, like accountancy, consulting, and law firms have a great advantage on this aspect. In addition an intranet facilitates global exchange of information of you organization. By integrating the external and internal websites, an organization would be able to create powerful holistic information systems to enable it distributes and gather information from other departments and organizations.

However, the reaction of any senior management is well understood, they are skeptical about technology, they misunderstand that technology usually costs more, it is expensive to maintain and delivers less than promised (McGrath, 1997). Conclusions I therefore suggest; pilot intranet applications with a small test group before it is rolled out to the broad or the whole audiences, conducts a research on the costs involved, and focus on intranet applications that have revenue generations potential as well as cost saving benefits.

References

McGrath, G. (1997) . Intranet Communicator. Website www. jmir. org; retrieved on 1st Dec. 2007