Intranet Portals The Unique Needs of Housing Associations SORCE White Paper January 2008

Transcription

1 Intranet Portals The Unique Needs of Housing Associations SORCE White Paper January 2008

2 AT A GLANCE: The Requirement: Housing Association Intranet to improve communication and productivity The Solution: SORCE Intranet/Extranet Portal The Benefits: Immediate deployment with the SORCE packaged Intranet solution saves on internal IT resource time and effort Over 35 business-ready applications that can be rolled out straight away Empowers users to manage and maintain the key information that they want to share Builds employee and volunteer teamwork and interaction by providing a single source of all documents and business process information Enables better decision-making with timely and accurate management reporting capabilities INTRODUCTION Housing Associations play a key role in building sustainable, vibrant communities in towns and cities throughout the country. As well as providing affordable homes to rent, Housing Associations also provide: Homes to rent or buy in a range of price brackets, including key worker properties Homes specifically designed for people with special needs such as older people or those with disabilities Homes for people who need extra support, for instance individuals who are recovering from mental illness or have been homeless Altogether, the 1400 Housing Associations in England and Wales alone provide over 1.8 million affordable homes, including over 500,000 for older people and those with special needs. In addition, Housing Associations employ over 100,000 people who are supported by thousands of unpaid volunteers. Although Housing Associations are not-for-profit organisations, they are highly accountable to their communities and the effective management of the funds and resources available to them. The following white paper examines the contribution an Intranet portal can make to the day-to-day operations of a Housing Association. In particular, we examine the advantages an Intranet can deliver in employee communication, information sharing and building more effective collaboration between employees and volunteers.

3 LIMITATIONS OF IN-HOUSE INTRANETS Housing Associations needing to make their intranet a more interactive and useful tool have historically required both financial and staffing commitments, when developing their intranet/extranet in-house. Smaller Housing Associations have historically built static sites, consisting of HTML documents with little interactivity. This type of in-house development, in general becomes stale and disused, as the considerable amount of support and maintenance needed creates a drain on I.T. resources. Information Technology staff in charge of content duties are swamped with HTML input, and the intranet became defunct because of out-of-date information, generating user apathy. Larger organisations, facing fewer financial constraints than smaller ones, still face the prospect of a work- intensive solution, with spiralling labour costs. Placing static documents on the hosting server through either workflow process software or by manual input, larger organisations face the same major barriers to success as smaller organisations. Namely, that anyone without HTML skills cannot contribute to their corporate intranet. Whilst some large organisations have built web-based applications for their intranet, it is very rare that a standardised approach has been taken to application security and its management. Staff attrition rates within organisations also create problems for internally developed intranets. Varying employee skills and stop-start development between staffing shortages can translate to uneven product standards and disjointed coding. To paraphrase a legendary singer, knowledge has just left the building. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations need to examine the status of their current Intranet portal, if they have one, to determine whether or not it is doing the job it was set up to do.

4 COMPETING DEMANDS ON IT Whatever the size of a Housing Association, updating content, creating and improving new application software are time-intensive tasks, especially for organisations without the long-term skills at their disposal. Qualitative data has found that new generation intranet/extranet technology enables IT staff to concentrate upon networking, security and applications that contribute directly to the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations need to explore the most effective use of their IT resource and use packaged applications where bespoke development will consume too much time and resource. RAPID DEPLOYMENT Rapidly deployed intranets/extranets alleviate time intensive duties, such as initial installation and upgrades, enabling webmasters, intranet managers or whoever is in charge, to contribute and update information fast. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations need to focus on their core activities and harness the capabilities of specialist software providers to manage deployment and upgrades and empower users to maintain their content. BENEFIT FROM COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE Intranet solution vendors such as SORCE have developed pools of specialised knowledge within their organisation, drawing experiences from existing customers and business partners to enable best-of-breed solutions to be developed. In contrast, in-house developed solutions cannot tap into this outside knowledge, relying primarily on the skill-set within the organisation, and their previous experiences. Despite the above there is however quite a strong case for the fact that a vendor will never really understand the intricacies of particular business needs down to fine levels. More simply put can an out of the box solution match the organisation s true requirements?

5 Mature product vendors have recognised this problem and allowed for customisation and enhancements to take place within the product environment. More advanced products allow for both this and seamless integration with mainstream development platforms so that the advantages that in house development brings are not lost. These products do not embrace the either or philosophy (EITHER make and get 100% of what you need eventually OR buy and only get 80% at best) but rather the idea that you buy and get 80% from day one. You can then focus any development resource available on the intricacies that no vendor can provide out of the box. Typically most of this effort is about tweaking the shipped applications, so again highly efficient. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations should explore the advantages to be gained from deploying an Intranet solution that can be productive from day one AND can be customised to provide unique capabilities and online services. EMPIRE BUILDING IS AN UNAFFORDABLE LUXURY Experience shows that a major hurdle to selecting a vendor solution is the vested interests of internal staff, within development/ intranet project management teams. Staff may see the availability of a product based solution as a threat to job security. The mandate of a corporate intranet/extranet solution is to enable IT departments and users to work more intelligently, empowering IT staff to continue with other more relevant work which will secure their futures rather than threaten them. If a job role has been created solely to deliver static intranet content, then the organisation may be pouring money down the drain in development and ongoing costs as we demonstrate below. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations should explore the operational efficiencies to be gained from using an intranet package to free IT resource for business-critical projects.

6 STRATEGIC ALLIANCES Most vendors do not develop everything that forms part of the product they sell. Vendors are much better positioned to form strategic alliances than inhouse developers. As a result best-of-breed solutions can evolve where alliances have been made with search engines, news aggregation organisations etc. These alliances ensure that that there is a good proven fit between each of the products and the overall solution available quickly moves out of the scope that in house development can achieve. The SORCE Intranet portal, for example, comes with 30 business-ready applications such as document management, document management (with version control), bulletins, news, training schedules, organisation charts, contact information and feedback. It also integrated with your business applications to extract information for management reporting. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations can focus on their core business and use the applications within the SORCE portal to encourage greater communications and collaboration between users. DOCUMENTATION AND MANUALS Readily available solutions provide training and technical manuals, in stark comparison to a home grown solution, which either are not available (because of the time factors involved in creating one) or are brief at best. Add to this update training courses, and the time taken to train staff can spiral out of control. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations can benefit from the structured documentation and user training that dedicated Intranet portal providers will deliver as part of their overall solution. EVOLVING INFORMATION NEEDS Housing Associations are using intranets to increase work efficiencies through collaboration, and knowledge sharing. It is a well-publicised fact that effectively managing, storing and using information can lead to better customer service and satisfaction. Many organisations are now looking to implement solutions that offer a single point of access for users, embedding applications, documents, and

7 knowledge within a single easily accessible and secure repository to improve work efficiency. Product-based solutions provide a framework, with which communications can be made between a multitude of stakeholders inside and outside the housing association (e.g. employees, volunteers, suppliers and others). Housing Associations are dynamic and changing organisations that need to use a solution that is as future-proof as possible. Ad-hoc development of intranet systems can be difficult at best, as new coding needs cut fiercely into IT resources and budgets. Medium and long-term costs associated with re-development can be very expensive indeed. The organisation needs to establish exactly how the vendor solution will deal with this issue if the solution is difficult or clumsy in this respect the organisation may be no better off than developing their own solution in the first place. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations need to identify their requirements for an Intranet, including potential future needs and carefully assess packaged solutions against these requirements. DEVELOPMENT & ON GOWING COSTS A standard intranet/extranet solution has had on average, six years worth of development time implemented within the product. If we consider one developer as the intranet programmer, consider the equation: Medium/senior level developer Six year development programme 35K (per annum) 6 x 35K = 210K (in total) Many organisations facing deadlines to attain comparative or lesser levels of functionality will find that this long term expenditure too high. This figure can be well over twice the amount in comparison to a vendor s solution. Also consider the project timescale costs: One year development programme Two year development programme 180K (6 staff) 90K (3 staff)

8 In addition, labour costs specific to content static or HTML driven websites will incur a further guaranteed expenditure: Intranet manager 25K (per annum) Using a vendor solution enables your organisation to gain instant leverage over internal development and labour costs, without the project timescale headaches. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations need to weigh up the costs of in-house development against the costs of purchasing a packaged solution that can be implemented quickly and has business-ready applications ready to deploy from day one. PACKAGED SOLUTIONS Packaged solutions address the issues that many organisations face when intending to implement an intranet/extranet solution. They should provide the following features/benefits: FOR IT STAFF: Rapid roll out - quick installation enabling an intranet to be operational within days, not months or years. IT resource friendly empowering IT staff to get on with other duties, whilst others contribute to the intranet. Application integration with third party web-based software solutions and various office suites. Document management control - with the managed document vault. Customisable security and access controls enables granular access control for users, down to the document and database field level. Develop bespoke applications - customise the business -ready made applications quickly with an application generation tool. Fully scalable no technical limit on the number of users and accessible applications.

9 FOR MANAGEMENT/GENERAL USERS: Single point of access to information, documents and knowledge. Easy and accurate search of all content. Browser based use and contribution of documents. Empowers employees through localised administration to maintain and keep website current. Personalised home page encourages regular use. Increases user productivity and saves user time. Reduces and hardcopy waste by making all business documents available via the intranet. Proven return on investment for the organisation. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations can benefit from the investment packaged portal solution providers have made in developing their products to address the needs of users in many different sectors. PARALLEL COMPARISONS The home grown vs. vendor solutions debate can be compared to ERP and financial software within the last decade. Solutions developed by SAP, Oracle and Sage are popular choices, as organisations would not dream of developing these applications themselves. The primary function of a Housing Association is to manage the housing requirements of their members, not to develop software. ACTION POINT: Housing Associations need to capitalise on the experience of specialist Intranet portal providers to ensure their solutions are meeting the needs of users in this specialist sector.

10 IN SUMMARY WHY CHOOSE A PACKAGED INTRANET PORTAL? In-house developed database-driven Intranets are rarely adequate for future requirements and depend heavily upon internal resource and budget to remain useful and relevant. Constant technology advances for intranet solutions dictate that the need for in-house development, training and documentation will also increase. Strategic alliances and collective knowledge within a third-party product far outweighs any internally developed solutions. A packaged Intranet portal can solve an organisation s knowledge management problems within a fraction of the time needed to develop an internal solution. All Housing Associations have enough on their plate managing their core responsibilities and servicing their members. Choosing a packaged solution removes the need to expend valuable in-house IT skills on intranet development. A packaged solution delivers a rapid return as it can be deployed within days and you can quickly see the advantages of better information sharing, employee collaboration and access to management information.

11 ABOUT SORCE SORCE specialises in intranet, extranet and portal solutions. Our solutions help customers to deliver more business value through better communication and collaboration and improved business processes. Employees, customers, business partners and suppliers benefit from immediate and secure access to the information and knowledge they need to work more productively and effectively. SORCE technology powers intranet and extranet solutions for over 100 organisations and we have more than 75,000 users worldwide. Our clients cover a wide range of sectors from finance to manufacturing, not for profit organisations such as charities and housing associations as well as local authorities and other public sector agencies. SORCE provides everything any organisation needs to design, deploy and manage an intranet or extranet configured to their unique communication, collaboration and business process improvement needs. The SORCE solution scales easily from 50 to users and can be easily adapted for international organisations that need to provide local language intranet and extranet solutions. A SORCE intranet or extranet helps organisations put information to work. SORCE includes a growing portfolio of business-ready applications that can be implemented out of the box to deliver immediate benefits in information sharing, knowledge and collaboration throughout an organisation. The SORCE application development platform also enables users to develop custom applications that can add unique business value to their Intranet. SORCE takes precautions to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this publication and is not liable for any errors. The information in this publication is subject to change without notice. SORCE has over 8 years of experience in delivering Intranet and Extranet solutions to connect organisations, people and knowledge. We recognise that an intranet or extranet is much more than an internal website. It is a business solution. That is why we work closely with all functions such as HR, finance, marketing, sales and IT to ensure that the SORCE solution fits the needs of your organisation and delivers ease of use and management in connecting people to knowledge. Copyright 2008, All Rights Reserved. SORCE and the SORCE logo are trademarks of SORCE Limited. All other trademarks are held by their respective companies. Tel: +44 (0) Web: