Intranets and knowledge systems

Intranets are inexpensive, scalable and easily accessible. Intranets can help organisations create a richer, more responsive information environment and provide support to staff at all levels.

A few examples:

An executive can work from home at any time of the day or night and log on to check out the next day's schedules.

A telephone technician can share technical diagrams with co-workers and explore different repair strategies.

A sales rep can check sales targets and internal news items.

A project manager can view project milestones and review software development logs online.

Intranets and standards

Intranet content may be gathered from many different sources within an organisation. Every department will also want to impose its own set of rules on the information it controls, but this process often results in complete chaos and confusion for users. Without an agreed and enforced set of standards, Intranets can become loose, baggy, unusable dumps for often vital pieces of information.

Company Intranets will continue to grow and the many different pages will need to be maintained. If the information is allowed to become outdated, users will no longer access it. As an example, a government Intranet with many pages of technical information has not been updated for two years. In the meantime technology has moved on and the information that was once vital to technical staff responsible for installation and deployment is now irrelevant.

Knowledge management

Knowledge can be defined as understanding that someone has gained through education, intuition, experience and insight.

Organisational knowledge is an important asset that needs to be managed like other assets. It also needs to be organised and presented in a way that allows it to be easily accessed by others.

How we can help ...

We can provide analysis of your current Intranet content and make recommendations in regard to usability. We can also supply you with a standards manual that defines:

We can help make your knowledge management system available to all levels of staff by first defining the audience and then writing text to suit specific users. For example, a user who needs technical information about network connectivity will need to quickly scan the text and find the information by the shortest possible route. On the other hand an executive looking for business benchmarks may need to study and digest material presented in longer format.

We can supply original content or help you update existing information for:

contact us: @Renfield Communications