Hello there, fellow intranet fanatic. Today, I bring you joy and another reason to celebrate in the midst of this very festive season: Intranet Appreciation Day.

I use our intranet, EVERY day and yet, I have never taken a moment to profess my love for The SQIntranet** on public grounds. I LOVE my intranet because it is the ultimate resource. It is pretty, it is informative, it is flexible, and, it allows me to effectively help my teammates! Below, I’ve highlighted my favourite SQIntranet area and the respective specific business problem that it addresses. THANKS to the capabilities offered by Intranet Connections, I am able to point my teammates to this area regularly which makes my life much easier.

**The SQIntranet is the intranet used by Intranet Connections.  SQ stands for “square box”, meaning simple.  Simplicity is one of our core company (and product) values.

Believe in the Magic of Self-Service

I am a knowledge hoarder. I LOVE to learn about the unknown and often find myself involved in knowledge seeking adventures. Unfortunately, for me, the passion for learning is a mindset that is not pre-compiled with a passion for creating documentation. A lack of documented knowledge can result in a long laundry list of problems.

Failing to record knowledge into a central document repository means that information is centralized within a few, or maybe even only one person.  This creates an “employee bottleneck”. The major downfalls to an employee bottleneck are very clear — find them described below.

From an Employee Perspective:

By nature, these employees love to learn and understand a concept, and to move quickly to next learning objective. It’s this passion that has permitted these employees to achieve this employee bottleneck status. It’s inevitable, once an employee becomes a centralized knowledge bottleneck, more time will be spent explaining a concept they already understand than learning a concept they haven’t faced before. This can result in a decrease in the overall happiness of your humanized assets.

From a Business Standpoint:

You cannot centralize all of your knowledge in an individual. I can summarize the downfall here with the answer to the following question: What happens when a humanized knowledge center leaves your organization? I am not here to say that is not a recoverable scenario but, it can result in huge losses for an organization. A MASSIVE amount of wasted time accumulates after the departure of a human knowledge center, or employee bottleneck. Each instance of time lost is small, often unnoticed, and is spent on learning information that was previously known by the ex-employee bottleneck. Depending on the depth of knowledge that was lost, the total amount of time wasted can vary.

Decentralizing organizational knowledge will result in a WIN-WIN scenario for you and your employees. From the perspective of your employees, they can continue to focus on their first passion: Learning new concepts that will benefit the organization. From the standpoint of the business, benefits may include: Higher morale and, huge long-term time cost savings. Time is money!!

Creating a Self-Service Area using Intranet Connections

Intranet Connections offers a solution for decentralizing knowledge and creating a self-service center. Create your knowledge center in four easy steps:

1. Go to admin > Applications > create application
2. Select the Knowledgebase template
3. Give the new application a name (eg, Knowledgebase, The Main Brain etc.)
4. Click create

That’s all there is to it. Visit the application and start uploading your knowledge. At Intranet Connections, we’ve applied smart delegation and security permissioning to give every employee the ability to add information to this centralized learning center, and we’ve learned to do this as part of our daily routine.

THANK YOU SQINTRANET for providing us with your almighty self-service capabilities, saving our company money and keeping our employees happy!

Tag – you’re it! What areas, encompassed within your intranet, have helped make your life easier? Don’t be shy – use the comments area below to tell us why you appreciate your business intranet.