Intranet for business or for communications?

There is a shift happening in intranets in terms of the role they play and their purpose.

• It used to be that intranets were seen as information repositories, a place to store stuff to refer to later, or as one client said "like a garage for your business documents".
• Then people started seeing the value in using the intranet to communicate to all employees so that consistent messages were sent to everyone.

Some organizations are still within those two phases, however, more is being demanded of intranets.

• The business has now realized that they are paying for something and they should be getting something back - enter ROI, efficiencies, productivity, and yes, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• And finally, the intranet is being edged out by more of a "portal" experience where employees can access all their online applications from one interface.

The intranet is changing and organizations need to recognize and identify opportunities to use the intranet both to achieve business results as well as to strategically communicate to the employee and have employees communicate with each other.