Claromentis Intranet Software Blog

As 2008 draws to a close it is interesting to reflect on the challenges companies of all sizes now face as they try to embrace permissioned information management as a way to foster creativity, improve collaboration on all fronts -  internally, with the supply chain and with customers -  and to become more efficient.

Information management is a fast moving world, and one that has always been a victim of confusing terminology and liable to disconnect between IT and the business. Just a few short years ago intranet platforms were nothing more than permissioned HTML resources with some forum and people based functionality. They were weak, but understandable – with clear boundaries.

Now intranet software vendors like Claromentis offer an enormous range of functionality across the business, and embrace every format of data into a single, managed information layer.

Not only that but they offer process management to automate inefficient processes by applying form based work flows, and even project management tools that simply were outside the lines of this space an internet heartbeat ago.

As a personal view, based on years of implementing intranet and extranet projects around the world for every conceivable type of company, I have the following a my top challenges that the client should really pay attention to at the end of 2008:

• Dedicated resource
• The offer of grass roots involvement for all departments within scope
• A well presented but flexible road map for the project with proper phasing of business goals
• Clarity
• A solution that can leverage open source developers – that is the irresistible tide for the coming years
• Commercial support
• An intranet vendor with great design skills
• Single sign on
• Ability to turn off old information stores
• A vision that lasts beyond short term excitements

Nice to haves :

• A project name
• Top level sponsorship
• Unified branding with all other brand experiences
• Lightning fast infrastructure
• Proper staging environments

I welcome comments on what you see as important intranet success factors!

As we have mentioned on many other blogs, given all of this power and the huge amount of information and procedures even SME companies have – I truly believe that once you have selected a good vendor to meet your own individual company needs, the single most important intranet success factor is making a dedicated resource available. It you cannot do that, then make a senior resource available on a 50% basis, and allocate budget to get a lot of service assistance from your vendor!

A successful project really does need time and effort.

General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, Services intranet roadmap, intranet software discussions

A significant trend has been happening over the last few years here at Claromentis, as our technology – and the space in which we operate - continues to mature and evolve at bewildering rates for those not used to the evolution of web based software.

I have given two specific high level presentations recently – and also redesigned from scratch a proposal document for a significant global company based in the USA – and I realised that neither the presentation or the proposal – for separate companies – included any details at all about our intranet software!

We keep a gallery of our web presence over the years, in fact this post by Michael is in interesting in this regard, and of course we can retrieve and review proposals we delivered to a range of companies looking for intranet solutions over the last 5 years.

There is a quite remarkable sea change here, obvious in just a surface scan of the relevant documents. In previous years we would always discuss features and functionality – because the general web space was moving so fast and every ISV, not just Claromentis, needed to continue to demonstrate that our solutions contained the functionality that our prospective clients needed.

In 2008 we have instead discussed our track record, our client base, global presence, our levels of customization and the fact that we are a PHP intranet framework that is commercially supported and open source extendable – all strategic issues that reflect our ability to partner with a new customer over the 5 year time frame to deliver their own as yet unplanned requirements. We are engaged in portals now for such critical issues as Competitive Marketing Intelligence, Sustainability portals, and managing Policies and procedures in a new online way to produce dramatic improvements in legislative compliance.

No-one is that interested in the details – yesterdays intranet peaks have become today’s functional commodities. Our discussions have genuinely moved back to where the requirements originated, and not on how they will be delivered in technical detail. And our conversations are more and more at board level. Long may it continue – it is about time the collaboration platform world delivered on its hyped up promises of yesteryear.

General Intranet Posts intranet software discussions, intranet software proposals