Most corporate intranets share some standard characteristics and have similarities in terms of how they are implemented, but no two are exactly alike. The basic platform offers a wide range of possibilities, and these options should be configured to reflect the business strategy of your organization.
For a professional services firm, that means tailoring the basic intranet platform to best meet your industry requirements as well as your firm’s unique ways of doing business.
Let’s take a step back and clarify what we mean when talking about a company intranet or an extranet. These are enterprise tools that are defined primarily by controlled access, rather than specific capabilities.
An intranet provides access mainly for internal communication and knowledge sharing. An extranet, on the other hand, is designed to provide access to external collaborators, such as partner organizations, clients and customers.
In terms of capabilities, at the most basic level, an intranet disseminates information to employees. More advanced intranets may focus on two-way communication, using social enterprise tools.
Other common capabilities include:
- Knowledge management system
- Social functionality
- News dissemination
- Online collaboration tools
- Personalization
Intranet Requirements For Professional Services Firms
In designing an intranet for your professional services firm, it’s good to use the 80/20 rule. You should anticipate that 80 percent of your firm’s intranet needs are common, while the remaining 20 percent are likely to be specialized or unique.
Different types of professional services firms have their own use cases. For law firms, intranet needs generally revolve around case management and creating a large volume of documents. For health firms, data volume is a major use case. Finance firms need an intranet to meet specific security and confidentiality restrictions, such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act.
But no matter what type of professional services you offer, the most important thing is to be crystal clear in terms of the business objectives for your intranet. What are you trying to accomplish?
Since collaboration technology is constantly changing, focus on defining your user needs instead of focusing on implementing a particular tool, whether that’s an intranet, SharePoint sites or social enterprise.
To identify these needs, you might start by having a workshop. Next, you could conduct user research to see how your employees actually work in their day-to-day tasks and what problems they’re trying to solve. Then, start breaking these problems down into component parts. When you’re asking the right questions, some issues may turn out to not be problems after all.
Once you’ve identified these user needs, you’re ready to choose the specific technology solutions to address your most pressing workplace problems. For example, let’s say that you need to streamline your process for generating and approving proposals. To meet this need, you might choose to combine a SharePoint intranet with an experience management solution.
Or, let’s say you need to help your distributed workforce work better together. The solution here might be to encourage collaboration through social enterprise tools or a unified communications platform, such as Lync.
At the end of the day, clarity on business goals is an indicator of success. It helps you avoid getting distracted by side issues and make good decisions that bring your users’ needs and goals together with the company’s needs and goals.
