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  9 

Enhance the employee directory. The IBF say: ‘A good people search can be a 

killer app: many intranet experts agree that, more than anything else, staff want to 

use the intranet to get in touch with one another.’

 10 

Put senior leaders online. Intranets make it easier and more  cost-  effective for 

senior leaders to communicate their ideas and ‘walk the virtual floor’ – for example 

through blogs that allow staff to comment on posts, or through a regular online 

webcast or chat Q& A sessions.

 11 

Leverage online meetings. This is web conferencing which, although not directly 

enabled by the intranet, should facilitate collaboration.

 12 

Measure savings. The IBF state that: ‘Few organisations have made progress in 

measuring the cost savings they can attribute to the intranet, or even to parts of it.’ 

This is partly because it is difficult to measure cause and effect. But the study does 

give some examples:

● 

Ford estimates that online training delivered via its portal will drive down training 

costs to an average of $0.21 per class, down from $ 300–  $2,500 per class.

● 

Cisco cut the cost of processing employee expense reports from $50.69 with 

the previous  forms-  based system to $1.90 three years later. Total corporate 

savings by that third year were $7m. The average elapsed time for processing 

each expense report dropped from 21 to 4 days.

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Chapter 3  Managing digital business infrastructure

In addition to these ‘classical’ uses of intranets, intranet developer Odyssey (www. 

odyssey-i.com) identifies some less common intranet applications: