Intranets & Portals

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Get your intranet or portal working for you

An intranet or portal can help increase internal communications, operational efficiency, knowledge worker productivity, and cost savings for your organization. Intranets and portals can also empower your team with the ability to make better business decisions.

Many companies associate an intranet or portal with a particular solution. At Habañero, we recommend starting with an investigation of what you want to accomplish organizationally.

We encourage you to take a broader look at your intranet or portal strategy. Once we've established this strategy, we customize an off-the-shelf product or create a solution that supports your overall strategy and objectives. As such, we can easily measure the effectiveness of your intranet or portal, and you can easily measure your return on investment.

Realize the benefits

An effective intranet or portal can do the following for your organization:

  • Increase the effectiveness of decision making
    Overcome the significant problem of finding the right information to make timely and accurate decisions. For example, an intranet or portal allows you to find the right person to talk with in your organization, mine operational business data, or find a paragraph nested in a previously authored document.
  • Increase effectiveness and efficiency of processes
    Intranets and portals help you create more effective, repeatable processes. You can automate common enterprise tasks such as submitting expense reports or time sheets through a single portal interface. Team- or process-based websites help your employees share templates or other reusable collateral from process to process.
  • Increase enterprise collaboration
    Intranets and portals give your employees a virtual workspace to collaborate and communicate, tools to locate and learn from internal subject-matter experts, and the ability to host applications that eliminate the duplication of work or processes.
  • Improve information management
    Your employees have quick and easy access to all company information, as information is properly categorized, and disparate applications and data sources are tied together. This greatly enhances your company's customer relationship management strategies.
  • Improve internal communications
    Intranets and portals strengthen your company brand and deliver your corporate messages in a clear, consistent, and accurate manner. Your employees are more aware of what's going on and can participate in two-way communication processes with co-workers at all levels.

Working with you through the process

We've been developing and evolving intranets and portals for large- and medium-size organizations since 1996. Working with your organization we customize an intranet and portal solution to maximize your business benefits.

While the development of your intranet or portal is unique to your project, we provide the following services:

1. Strategic planning and analysis

Intranets and portals can be a big enterprise undertaking or a series of short iterative endeavors. They may be product focused (such as when implementing a product like Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or consist of developing a completely customized solution. This variability leaves many companies unsure of where to start. We help bring this unclear path into focus by:

  • developing a thorough understanding of your brand and internal communication focus
  • developing an understanding of all corporate information, and how it relates to your organization
  • examining your existing business processes
  • conducting user interviews and workshops with your key stakeholder groups
  • evaluating product options and alternatives
  • creating project roadmaps or a proof-of-concept, or implementing small team-based solutions that satisfy your specific organizational needs

2. User experience design

  • Information design
    The cornerstone of an effective intranet or portal is proper information design. Your employees need clear, relatable ways to navigate to information, and your content needs to follow a clear organizational taxonomy to ensure that it's easy to find. This is becoming more important as companies look to integrate other business systems (such as Document and Records Management repositories) with their intranets.
  • User interface design
    Our designers are experts at developing attractive user interfaces that can be easily integrated into your chosen portal or content management tool.
  • Usability engineering
    We conduct usability tests in our own Human-Computer Interaction Lab, where we've had lots of experience testing intranets and portals.

3. Technical development

Intranet and portal solutions often require additional custom development. Using Agile methodologies, we build solutions that integrate with your chosen intranet content management or portal product.

4. Technology infrastructure planning and support

We help develop a reliable technical platform that fits within your company's infrastructure and utilizes your existing investments in technology, ensuring your solution is as robust and forward thinking as possible.

5. Governance

Never leave your intranet or portal to collect cobwebs. It needs constant care and nurturing to ensure it continues to be an effective tool for your employees. We ensure your technology can be continually maintained and improved as required. We also help create business processes to improve your intranet over time to keep pace with your employees' changing needs.

6. Change management

We often conduct end-user training and build the internal skills and experience required to support the people, processes, and technology aspects of your intranet or portal. When your endeavor is large, we partner with companies such as Nexient that deliver top-of-the-line custom training solutions.

Throughout your project

In order to help guarantee a successful intranet or portal launch, we perform two critical tasks throughout your project:

Strategic fit analysis

We constantly ensure your intranet or portal initiative addresses meaningful business drivers. At various points throughout your project, we confirm your intranet or portal is returning value on your investment.

Change management

We often conduct end-user training and build the internal skills and experience required to support the people, processes, and technology aspects of your intranet or portal. When your endeavor is large, we partner with companies such as CDI Education Corporation that deliver top-of-the-line custom training solutions.