Page 92 - DLIS101_LIBRARY_AND_INFORMATION_SOCIETY

Unit 7: Libraries and Information Centers in India

effectiveness. Larger businesses allow users within their intranet to access public internet through Notes
firewall servers. They have the ability to screen messages coming and going keeping security intact.
The part of an intranet is made accessible to customers and others outside the business that part
becomes part of an extranet. Businesses can send private messages through the public network,
using special encryption/decryption and other security safeguards to connect one part of their
intranet to another.
Intranet user-experience, editorial, and technology go together to produce in-house sites. Most
commonly, intranets are managed by the communications, HR or CIO departments of large
organizations, or some combination of these.
Because of the scope and variety of content and the number of system interfaces, intranets of many
organizations are much more complex than their respective public websites. Intranets and their use
are growing rapidly. According to the Intranet design annual 2007 from Nielsen Norman Group,
the number of pages on participants’ intranets averaged 200,000 over the years 2001 to 2003 and has
grown to an average of 6 million pages over 2005–2007.

Benefits

• Workforce productivity: Intranets can help users to locate and view information faster and
use applications relevant to their roles and responsibilities. With the help of a web browser
interface, users can access data held in any database the organization wants to make available,
anytime and–subject to security provisions–from anywhere within the company workstations,
increasing employees’ ability to perform their jobs faster, more accurately, and with confidence
that they have the right information. It also helps to improve the services provided to the
users.
• Time: Intranets allow organizations to distribute information to employees on an as-needed
basis; Employees may link to relevant information at their convenience, rather than being
distracted indiscriminately by electronic mail.
• Communication: Intranets can serve as powerful tools for communication within an organi-
zation, vertically and horizontally. From a communications standpoint, intranets are useful
to communicate strategic initiatives that have a global reach throughout the organization.
The type of information that can easily be conveyed is the purpose of the initiative and what
the initiative is aiming to achieve. Some examples of communication would be chat, e-mail,
and or blogs. A great real world example of where an intranet helped a company communi-
cate is when Nestle had a number of food processing plants in Scandinavia. Their central
support system had to deal with a number of queries everyday. When Nestle decided to
invest in an intranet, they quickly realized the savings. McGovern says the savings from the
reduction in query calls was substantially greater than the investment in the intranet.
• Web publishing allows cumbersome corporate knowledge to be maintained and easily ac-
cessed throughout the company using hypermedia and Web technologies. Examples include:
employee manuals, benefits documents, company policies, business standards, news feeds,
and even training, can be accessed using common Internet standards (Acrobat files, Flash
files, CGI applications). Because each business unit can update the online copy of a docu-
ment, the most recent version is usually available to employees using the intranet.
• Business operations and management: Intranets are also being used as a platform for devel-
oping and deploying applications to support business operations and decisions across the
internet worked enterprise.
• Cost-effective: Users can view information and data via web-browser rather than maintain-
ing physical documents such as procedure manuals, internal phone list and requisition forms.
This can potentially save the business money on printing, duplicating documents, and the

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