“We don’t want to get so bogged down with checklists and forms and procedures that we lose our entrepreneurial spirit and perish in the fires of eternal corporate-sell-out damnation…”
To which my response is usually, “That’s nice, how does Chapter 11 sound instead?”
I understand where they’re coming from. Most entrepreneurs (or accidental entrepreneurs) are jaded against big business. They see the waste, the inefficiency, and endless layers of middle management and they flinch when someone proposes doing that to their baby.
What they missed seeing are examples of modern management done well. That’s where your forms, procedures, and checklists are built FROM your business’s best performance, in an effort to repeat it again and again. They’re not force-fit on you from some other organization unless you find that your business is doing it all wrong. And if that’s the case, well, you might be in the wrong line of business.
So what does any of that have to do with an Intranet? Everything! What large businesses excel in, what they live for, is documentation. And documentation is the best way to determine a.) what you do well b.) what you do poorly and c.) what you can repeat.
Intranets are also nice in that they give you an environment where you can control access. While I don’t advocate putting Trade Secrets anywhere that open, you can put a number of things that you would never share with clients or vendors, but think your business as a whole would benefit from knowing.
One perfect example of this is year-to-date sales performance. While some managers like to be very hush-hush on how well the business is doing in fear that people might leave, being open allows you to connect with employees when it comes to making hard decisions like cutting costs, or needing volunteers for new sales ideas and customer proposals.
So, how to make it happen. Here’s two ways:
You can use a pre-made tool like Backpack (http://backpackit.com) from 37Signals, the makers of Basecamp and HighRise CRM. It costs anywhere from $24-a-month for 6 users up to $149-a-month for up to 500 users. (On a per-user, per-year basis, that’s $48 a year per person on the low end.)
Backpack lets you create a variety of pages for whatever you need. You can include pictures, files, ad-hoc to-do lists, and share those pages with people in your company. What’s more, it adds a central calendar to your organization, so you can see what everyone’s obligations are at a glance.
Alternatively, if you need an email service, Google Apps (http://google.com/apps) makes for a pretty good small business intranet, at right around the same price point ($50 per year, per employee). In addition to the ability to create internal pages using Google Sites, your organization gets privately branded gmail accounts @yourcompanydomain, and also access to Google Docs, all with increased storage. Google Sites has a bit more of a learning curve over Backpack, but can do essentially the same thing with a bit of manipulation.
So, here’s the business case: if you’re a company of 6 users (Owner + five employees), that’s a cost of about $300 over the course of the year just for access. It would probably also take about $3,000 worth of labor before you start to see a noticable return on the investment. (About 20 hours of each person’s time, valued at $25 an hour.) This is what you need to begin documenting what each person does, how they do it, and why they do it the way they do.
For example: a bookkeeper might write, “I stamp each invoice with “Entered”, and hand-write on the date after I enter it into QuickBooks. If I see a one in the file and it’s not stamped, I know it’s not in the system yet. If we get a duplicate invoice, I staple it to the invoice I already entered.“
So the question is: can an Intranet save your company $3,300 worth of mistakes, office expenses, travel, or increase sales to make up the difference?
The technology is there to promote collaboration and replicate what’s been called either the university effect or synergy. Basically, where by forcing knowledgeable people in different disciplines together (sales, marketing, operations) you arrive at results that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
The answer is up to you and your specific needs. Some companies realistically can’t justify having one because they either have other substitutions for it (such as a weekly lunch) or just aren’t suited for it (such as an ice cream stand in a resort town).
So, here’s a question. How do you collaborate now? Does your company utilize the tool well, or poorly?
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