Peter Barron is an Intranet Connections Fan; he provides significant feedback on our blog, Linkedin and Facebook pages and speaks candidly about our software as it applies to his organization.  Over the past ten years, Peter has managed the Rio Rancho Public Schools intranet, which is internally called “Rionet”. With over 20 school district departments that use the rionet, Peter targets applications and widgets that make the intranet process fast and easy for thousands of users.  We recently interviewed Peter to find out what makes his intranet so successful, and today we are delighted to share his responses with our intranet community.

Here are Peter’s six tips for an efficient intranet::

1. Time: Seeing as Rio Rancho is a school district, the majority of intranet users are teachers. Teachers are incredibly busy with students during the day and they lack freedom of time to peruse their intranets. In order to overcome this timing issue, Peter leverages the notification capabilities of the “rionet” with subscriptions to departments that the teachers have invested interest in. This subscription service has been a big push for Peter and the Rio Rancho Schools because it decreases searching time on the intranet by targeting topics of interest for the user.

2. E-forms: Teachers must attend conferences, so Peter created PDF e-forms for them to request conference admittance and funding in rionet. Directly from their classroom, teachers fill out the request form, and it is processed right away.

Content management technologies advance so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. From enterprise content management (ECM) to electronic document management (EDM), business process management (BPM), business intelligence (BI), EDRM (electronic document and records management), records and information management (RIM) and more, technology increasingly resembles a bowl of alphabet soup. So many acronyms are floating around that it’s hard to know what order to put the letters in and what they’re supposed to spell.

Whether you’re scanning files for historical reference, providing information access via a customer portal, or are in the midst of enterprise-wide process automation, there are standard steps you should take that will help you to succeed. No matter what acronym your solution spells or what your goals are, these 26 steps should be applied and revisited throughout your project implementation. If you miss one, your project might turn out a bit differently from what you are hoping for. How and when you use each tip is up to you, but be sure to use them all!

Align your business and IT goals. Some of the greatest project failures result from a mismatch. IT’s role is to support business objectives, but IT resources are often stretched. Educate each other. Negotiate.

Budget carefully. Software and hardware alone don’t represent Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Customizations, disaster recovery planning, training, and testing carry costs. Plan accordingly.

Collaborate with all of your department managers. Set enterprise goals even if you’re starting with a departmental project. Think globally. Otherwise, you‘ll find yourself reworking projects unnecessarily.