Page 103 - DLIS408_INFORMATION_TECHNOLOGY-APPLICATIONSL SCIENCES

Information Technology and Application

Notes 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.

Self Assessment

Multiple choice questions:
4. Choose which one is correct:
(a) Intranets are used to deliver tools and application in sales and customer relationship
management tools to advance productivity.
(b) Internets are used in factory for advance productivity.
(c) Internets are used company worksers to get more productivity.
(d) None of these.
5. Most commonly intranets are managed by the communications .................... departments
of large organizations.
(a) HR or CIO (b) Manager or receptionist
(c) HR or Accounts (d) Accounts or CRM.

9.3 Benefits of Intranet

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
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 orga-
nization, vertically and horizontally. From a communications standpoint, intranets are
useful to communicate strategic initiatives that have a global reach throughout the organi-
zation. 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, email, and or blogs. A great real world example of where an intranet helped a
company communicate 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.

Notes Web publishing allows cumbersome corporate knowledge to be maintained and
easily accessed 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 document, the most recent version is usually available to employees using
the intranet.

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