This sponsored post is produced by Jive Software.
There are so many reasons why a new, social intranet makes sense for businesses: Maybe you want more collaboration between employees. Or you want to serve customers better by giving employees easier access to answers and information. Or perhaps you already have an intranet, but it’s an aging ghost town of unconnected resources and zero interactivity.
But once you’ve realized the need for an interactive intranet, you may be asking yourself this important question: do I buy or do I build?
The numbers behind building an intranet
The realities of actually building your own social intranet — the cost, the time, the involvement, and the actual creation — can quickly become overwhelming. Before your IT team embarks on building a custom intranet, here are a few numbers to consider that are detailed in The 10 Best Intranets of 2015.
4: The number of years, on average, a team spends building an intranet
While custom intranet creation is getting more streamlined (in 2012, creating an intranet took four years!), they still take 17+ months to build, especially as technology advances and budgets change. That’s also why the majority of intranets are now launched with iterative changes, as opposed to waiting to launch one new, huge intranet design. It just takes too long.
52,000: The average size of organizations an intranet supports
The larger your company, the more helpful an intranet is. But creating a powerful and user-centric community for 50K+ people? Not an easy task. It takes the right team, tools, and support. Which leads into the next number…
19: The average size of a team responsible for building an intranet
(Or 0.036 percent the size of the organizations they support.) That includes all employees working full or part-time on the site, as well as outside consultants contributing to the project. Which is why…
8 out of 10: The percentage of IT teams that hire outside resources
The majority of IT teams hire external specialists or agencies for help with a variety of activities and technologies. This includes content strategy and training, design, development, implementation, usability, and user experience research… the list goes on.
On a brighter note, building your own intranet allows you to have full control over what you build. But the journey for you and your IT team? It’s not an easy one.
IT Pains
It’s no secret: traditional intranets age quickly. Intranet design passes rapidly out of fashion, forcing you to continually update intranet features — which isn’t done cheaply. All the while, your team is struggling through chargeback schemes and rigid change control processes. And once you upgrade complex customizations and finally deliver an updated intranet release? Your business users will be asking why it “doesn’t work like Facebook” or “doesn’t look like a news website” or “doesn’t work on my smartphone.”
In short, the journey to building your own intranet isn’t an easy one. Want to see how a DIY intranet plays out? Check out the infographic Game of Intranet Pursuit.
Want a simpler solution — a platform that makes work life easier for the employees who use it and for the IT teams who maintain it? Get the right tools and helpful facts behind buying an interactive intranet.
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