Employee Portals – Inspiration or Frustration?

On behalf of, Tanja Zboril, Program Manager OpenText

Your company certainly has an intranet or an employee portal where HR and Top Management share information with employees. However, there are huge pitfalls in the negative event of a badly implemented employee portal and huge benefits in case of a smart implementation.

The biggest pitfalls and drawbacks of poorly designed intranets are:

• Information is hard to find. Reason #1 for this: there is not ONE integrated intranet, but a fragmented landscape of information resources.

• Intranets are designed top-down instead of bottom-up. Collaboration and cooperation is not part of the design. Companies are missing out on valuable information sharing and synergies among employees.

• Upload of web content is tedious and time consuming. Very often, the people who are contributing web articles cannot even upload the information themselves but need to turn to IT for help. This results in outdated information and low motivation to add new content.

• Information cannot be accessed from anywhere. Place-dependent employee portals sometimes exclude large numbers of employees from participating in the information flow.

What do you think about your portal solution? Is it an Inspiration or Frustration?