Building a business case for your new intranet: Foundations

Make your first steps towards a new intranet less daunting by building a structured business case. Here’s how.

You might instinctively know your organisation needs a new intranet, but instinct alone isn’t enough to justify the time, effort and money needed to build one. To do that, you’ll need to create a compelling business case.

A business case lays the foundations for progress towards your new intranet – so if you don’t know where to start, this is it. It helps make it clear why you need a new intranet now, and how it will support your organisation in the future. And, done properly, it will open the right doors and unlock the funding to make it a reality.

Building a business case for a new intranet is a straightforward but essential task. It’s much better to identify challenges and overcome them on paper, rather than hit roadblocks with stakeholders – or, worse, get in a mess once the project is underway.

Set some goals

The first thing you should do is identify goals for your intranet that can act as touchpoints throughout the project. They should be high-level, simple, achievable statements that would be supported by the deployment of a new intranet.

Goals vary for every business. They will be determined by your organisation’s situation, and should reflect its purpose, values and aspirations. In order to make sure you make the strongest case possible, try to come up with goals that are distinct and don’t cross over too much.

High-level goals that your intranet could help achieve might include:

  • Become a more customer-centric organisation
  • Maintain a profitable and sustainable business
  • Attract and retain talented staff
  • Unite geographically disparate staff
  • Become a truly global business

Add some detail

Once you have four or five high-level goals, it’s time to drill deeper. Define a key objective for each goal. State what features would enable you to make this happen, and provide a vision of how success will look when your objective is achieved, through the lens of a new intranet.

For example:

Goal

Confident and informed staff culture across the business

Key objective

Enable key documents and pages to be located, shared and updated by all staff, ensuring everyone has equal access to the latest information.

Features needed

  • A search engine as intuitive as Google
  • Page creation with minimal training requirement
  • Straightforward document management

How success will look

  • All employees are confident that they can quickly find the corporate information they need.
  • Staff capture the information they hold and share it with the right people.
  • The intranet is the first place people look when they need to know something.

What’s next?

Once you’ve completed this exercise for each of the goals you defined, you should have the start of a really strong business case for a new intranet clear in your mind.

In the next blog post in this series, we look at building your business case further and taking it to key stakeholders. You can also find out more about our Kira intranet solution – ideal for everyone from small businesses to public sector bodies and multinationals.

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