At the IT Roundtable last week, I asked the gathering of mostly church IT administrators, “How many of you don’t have an intranet?”. I was a bit shocked as most of them raised their hands.

It seems many IT administrators consider an intranet as yet another data store to maintain. From my perspective, this is exactly the opposite of why I think an intranet should exist in any organization of 50 employees or more. The last thing an intranet should do is create an additional place to create new things such as files and additional data.

In my opinion, an intranet should first serve as a read-only hub which ties together all the different database systems into a single, consolidated interface. In a church environment, this means providing interfaces into your member database, events system, and personnel data. Simple searching capabilities should be the goal here. The next level of functionality an intranet should provide is that of simple forms routing (what I call “E-Forms”). Finally, I would suggest making staff-wide documents (such as policies & procedures or other HR documents) available through the intranet. The intranet should be a “one stop shop” for all the basics that your staff need.

Now for the hard news: Intranets and software developers go hand-in-hand. You need a full-time web developer who can build the connections to the databases and provide the centralized access I described above.

What’s the point? Saving time. If you were to do an analysis on the amount of time your staff spends just searching for information, you might be surprised. Consider this: if you are able to save 10 minutes of time a day for 50 staff members by providing simple search tools on your intranet, that multiplies out to 8.33 hours per day. That’s a salary. That’s ROI.