| Cost Savings
Most organizations are striving to reduce the cost of doing business to deal with the pressure of a highly competitive, global marketplace. The starting justification for many intranets is the decreased cost of producing, accessing and distributing information within an enterprise.
Analysts estimate that 18% of corporate printed material becomes outdated within 30 days. Documents that are printed and mailed, such as internal phone books, policy and training manuals, requisition forms and marketing materials, can be put on an internal web server and updated for a fraction of the cost of reprinting material. It is not only the publishing but the updating of information that leads to savings.
Intranets also allow information to be rapidly and economically deployed to a dispersed group of employees. A marketing planner for a global pharmaceutical concern notes that before the deployment of an intranet, his division was spending about US $30,000 per month on information mailings to sales representatives. He adds that "by the time the information arrived to our global representatives and affiliates it was usually out of date." The development costs of an intranet database "were more than offset by savings in printing and mailing."
Fast access to information is another key intranet cost saving. If an intranet means that every employee in an 50,000 person corporation saves 10 minutes per day, the cumulative cost saving is enormous - much greater than the savings from reduced printing and mailing costs.
A case in point are the savings achieved by a leading management consulting firm, as reported in a recent study conducted by International Data Corporation. The firm established a knowledge database of best practices, job histories, resumes, threaded messages and ideas for clients, accessable to all employees. The consultancy calculated that over a three year period it saved US $390,000 through the elimination of phone calls, overnight mail and faxes. In addition, the company saved an estimated US $22 million by reducing the time required to find and access employee data and collaborative information.
| 