Just as importantly, intranets dramatically reduce the costs (and time) of content development, duplication, distribution, and usage. The traditional publication model includes a multi-step process including:
- creation of content;
- migration of content to desktop publishing environment;
- production of draft;
- revision;
- final draft production;
- duplication;
- distribution.
- creation of content
- migration of content to intranet environment.
In this latter model, revision becomes part
of the updating process while the original content is available to the
end users, thus dramatically reducing the time it takes for the information
to become available to
the user of that information. As the information
is centrally stored and always presumed to be current, the company will
not have to retrieve "old" information from employees to be replaced with
new information, thus saving any expenses incurred in updating.
This new publishing model can dramatically reduce both costs and the timeframe involved. Assuming that the corporate LAN environment can support intranet activities (and most can), the information technology (IT) infrastructure is already in place. In addition, most popular intranet Web servers can run on platforms widely found in most organizations (Wintel 80486 or Pentium computers, Apple Macintosh, Novell NetWare, etc.), so that little if any additional infrastructure is needed.
Organizations estimate that the traditional model may entail physical duplication and distribution costs of as high as £9 per employee, costs separate from the content development or testing phases. An organization with 100,000 employees may find potential cost savings of moving to an intranet strategy for a single application-the employee policies and benefits manual-of £900 000 alone. And this cost savings does not reflect the additional value in an intranet solution which makes information more readily available to employees, thus raising both their productivity and job satisfaction.
