It’s 2022. We no longer know what a commute is. We haven’t seen the inside of a meeting room for years. Fluorescent lighting is but a distant, migraine inducing, memory. You are safely ensconced in your home office, wrapped in your favorite blanket (that you toss aside to reveal your work outfit 3 seconds before joining that Zoom meeting). But wait…where’s that document you needed again? You can’t remember who read and confirmed the finalized version of the policy you created. Where do you submit an expense form again? Moments like these, while exaggerated, highlight the importance of using your intranet as a single source of truth, to smooth out the creases of remote and hybrid work.
What’s your current system?
While there are certainly other document management systems out there, such as iCloud or Google Cloud, they lack a number of key features that true purpose-made document management software has. When your document management system live in the same place as your workflows, your expense forms, your company calendar, and your departmental sites, you have everything you could possible need at your fingertips—empowering your workforce to be more efficient, and streamlining compliance management and security. At IC, we call that “having a single source of truth”.
And even some business-centric solutions, like shared company drives, have their pitfalls. Version management control, the ability to retrieve lost or accidentally deleted files, efficient search capabilities; these are things we take for granted until we really need them (trust us, we’ve been there too), and most solutions don’t provide them.
Where to build your Single Source of Truth?
When you use your intranet as your single source of truth, you are creating one main place where employees can rely on finding necessary information to perform their duties—wherever they are. A robust intranet solution allows you to merge document management, content calendars, automated forms, and policy management with other fun goodies that will pull users into your single source of truth.
With powerful cloud solutions, you can ensure that workers have access to all necessary info outside of the physical office—especially important during the age of WFH—while also maintaining a high level of security. With intranet document management, you are able to get granular with security, limiting access to certain files and folders and honing in on who has the power to create/edit certain documents in which team sites within your intranet (e.g., a marketing team member can only make edits to documents on the marketing team’s site).
Who is responsible for maintaining the truth?
The software side of creating a single source of truth is only half of the equation—constant maintenance is a must. Putting an intranet system in place with the purpose of document management is futile if it is not enforced. Consider assigning someone from each department to regularly audit files on each team site, and designating someone from HR, IT, or communications to do an intranet wide audit, and ensure that policies are updated and enforced, calendars are correct, and general document management organization is maintained (ensuring the deletion of duplicates, for example).
For some of these tasks, automation is your friend, and with IC’s software, you can set Review dates to send you a notification to remind you when a document may need updating. Whatever your role may be in your organization, our software will make it easy to ensure your single source of truth remains relevant and dependable for all employees.
Address the drawbacks of WFH with your intranet
WFH has become widely adopted since the COVID-19 pandemic and loved by many. Slews of workers are vowing never return to the office everyday—if at all—moving forward. What does that mean for your organization?
Well, it means that employees need to be able to rely on digital resources more than they did in 2019. There’s no cubicle neighbor who may have printed out the document that was accidentally deleted right before your meeting. Accessing documents remotely has become more important, raising security risks for people who embrace a digital nomad lifestyle and may be using public WIFI.
With all these pain points to consider, it’s paramount to shop for an intranet solution that aims to address them. IC’s intranet solution not only has an answer to all these problems, including cloud-based storage, superior security, and purpose-built document management, we’re also constantly working to update our software so it addresses the needs of tomorrow, today.
Get started today with Intranet Connections
If you’re ready to start building a single source of truth today, book a free demo with our sales team, and let them show you just how beneficial our intranet software can be to your remote workforce! Want to learn more about building a single source of truth? Check out our free template to get you started!
