Intranet Architecture

The corporate Intranet has been hailed as the most important business tool since the typewriter. Intranet help employees collaborate on business processors such as product development or order fulfillment, which create value for a company and its customers. Specifically, Intranets centralize the business process in an easily accessible, platform-independent virtual space. Intranets allow employees from a variety of departments to contribute the different skills necessary to carry out a particular process. While each department of a company may have its own virtual space, Intranet should be organized primarily around the business processes they help employees carry out, rather than the organizational chart of the company. Successfully process-oriented Intranets look and work as differently as the processes they enable, but they share several common characteristics. First they are built on smart information design. Second, they focus on tasks, not documents, and aim to integrate those tasks into distinct processes. Finally, the best Intranets encourage collaboration by creating shared and familiar spaces that reflect the personality of the company and create a common ground for all employees.

My first reaction to this article is I’m not surprised that the Intranet is becoming so popular. Intranet should group together all the tasks that make up a business process that can be relatively discreet and complex. The most important processes in a company is to create value for a customer. These are the central processes, which every Intranet should help employees accomplish. Even simple processes can become more efficient when incorporated into an Intranet. More complex processes can also be effectively integrated into an Intranet.

I agree that the Intranet can break through departmental walls to help accomplish business processes more efficiently. For example, a customer complaint might involve people and information from the accounting, sales and marketing department. Even though the employee necessary to resolve the complaint work in different departments, they are all involved in the process of customer service. By creating spaces for cross-departmental collaboration, the Intranet can help employees collaborate to efficiently carry out the central processes of the company, and cut costs by avoiding in-person conferences and employee reallocations. Intranets can also bring together employees and partners who are geographically dispersed to work on common problems. Travel costs are eliminated, and employees can increase their productivity by sharing knowledge.

Intranet is described in the textbook as a corporate internetwork that provides the key Internet applications, especially the World Wide Web. It is also an implementation of Internet technologies within a corporate organization rather than for external connection to the global Internet. Good Intranets should be machines for doing business. Just as design is integral to a good building, it is key to creating an effective Intranet. The organization and design of information on an Intranet should map out the key business processes of a company, and provide employees with access to the information and people necessary to carry out those processes. The truly effective Intranet creates new channels of communication that overcome inefficient organizational structures and foster new forms of efficient collaboration. It serves as a model for a company centered around processes rather than departments, collaboration rather than closed doors. Building an effective Intranet means thinking about how documents can be used to accomplish tasks, how tasks can be organized into processes, and how those processes can be carried out collaboratively by virtual work groups. The effective Intranet is not only a tool; it is also a model for an efficient, process-centered enterprise a machine for doing business.