Many large companies have their own corporate portal. This does not mean the official website created for communication with clients and partners, but the internal website of the company, intended exclusively for its employees. What is this - a luxury or a real necessity?

Let's start with the fact that a corporate portal is not exactly a website, although it looks like one. The functions of the corporate portal are wider than the functions of the average website. Such a portal is a web interface that combines the functions of an information resource, a social network and a storage of documents and other files. Typically, a corporate portal is available only on the organization’s internal network (intranet) - an “outside” person will not be able to access it.

Why does a company need a corporate portal? Firstly, he provides communication between different departments and divisions of the company, reducing the time it takes to transmit important information. This is especially true for banks and other organizations that have many branches (within one city or in different cities). Instead of notifying each branch about innovations, you can post the information on the corporate portal so that everyone receives it on time.

Secondly, the corporate portal ensures effective employee communication. This is especially important when working on joint projects. As in the previous case, each employee can transfer the required information to the recipient as quickly as possible. Staff have easy access to the necessary data. In addition, the social network integrated into the portal makes up for the lack of communication among employees - it is better to let them communicate on the portal on work issues than to sit on Odnoklassniki.

Thirdly, the corporate portal facilitates document flow and reporting. Shared file hosting allows you to upload the necessary documents directly to the portal. This makes it easier to collaborate on documents. Plus, it never hurts to have a backup copy of your work materials.

The corporate portal can also be used to train and onboard new personnel, strengthen horizontal connections between departments, and reduce the need for business travel. The work process in the organization will become more transparent. This is necessary for both employees (awareness of the specifics of the company’s activities is an important component of motivation) and management (it is easier to control the work process of employees).

Of course, corporate portals also have their drawbacks. Development, configuration, support and administration of the portal must be carried out by a qualified specialist who must be paid. Add to this the time and financial costs of training employees to use the portal.

Also possible leak of corporate data to competitors in case of portal hacking. Sometimes competitors don’t even have to use the services of a hacker - all it takes is one unscrupulous employee who is ready to “leak” internal information to competitors for a fee. So it is very important to ensure maximum security of the portal - and this, again, is an expense.

There are several approaches to creating a corporate portal. Can be ordered portal development from scratch, then it will best meet your individual requirements. But such development is not cheap, it takes a lot of time, plus you will need to pay developers for ongoing support. Can buy a ready-made platform, which will have to be modified to suit your needs - but for this, most likely, you will need highly specialized specialists.

Therefore, most companies prefer buy ready-made solutions based on a content management system (CMS). Such systems have an intuitive interface, so that after installing and configuring the system by specialists, almost any employee can administer the corporate portal. He will not need knowledge of programming or HTML layout. But this does not mean that the portal can be left without technical support - it’s just that in this case it will cost you less.

The corporate portal is effective internal corporate communication system, allowing you to optimize business processes in large companies with many employees, departments and branches. But if you have a small company, the entire staff of which fits into two offices, you are unlikely to need such a portal - the game won’t be worth the candle.

A corporate portal is an automated system for managing an organization’s internal information resources, as well as for collective work on projects, tasks, documents and communication between employees and clients of the company.

Corporate portals can be installed both on corporate servers and in the cloud. Since the corporate portal is a single resource for aggregating and working with information, it can safely be called an internal corporate social network with all its inherent set of functions.

Main functions of the corporate portal

Corporate portals have become widespread due to their rich set of functions covering almost all areas necessary for the collaboration of organization employees. First of all, this:

• Internal and external communications

Portals allow us to speed up the process of communication between employees and with clients thanks to the messengers we are familiar with and other tools that are familiar to us from social networks. Such as “live feed”, alerts, etc. The ability to create various business chats by business area or project speeds up the process of communication and making the necessary decisions. Many portals allow you to make phone calls to colleagues who are not online. Also, modern corporate portals allow you to communicate in work groups and with company clients about ongoing projects and resolve current issues.

• Task and project management

Tasks and projects are an integral part of the work process of any organization. Corporate portals, as a rule, have a wide range of convenient tools for working with them. Starting from setting a task, managing calendar deadlines, delegation mechanisms, checklists, ready-made templates, ending with various constructors and filters. All this allows you to monitor the timely completion of assigned tasks and evaluate the work of employees, receiving relevant reports from them.

• Collaborate with documents

The functionality of many corporate portals makes it very convenient to work with documents. Create, edit, store, configure access levels to documents, etc. At the same time, very often, to work with a document, you do not need to download it to your computer and, after completion, upload the updated version back. Third-party online services such as Google Docs and MS Office allow you to work with documents directly on the portal. The corporate portal allows you to conveniently share documents with colleagues, create external links to documents, both for access by colleagues and clients.

• Planning and recording of working hours

The effectiveness of an organization largely depends on work discipline. Using corporate portals, you can keep track of employee working hours. They will mark the beginning and end of the working day, as well as all kinds of breaks, absences, business trips, etc. All this information will help optimize the time spent on projects and tasks. Many portals have a good set of meeting tools. Mass mailing of invitations, planning meetings in calendars, as well as notifying all participants and the results and tasks of the meeting.

• CRM:Clients and sales

Many corporate portals offer CRM system functions, which allows you to maintain a database of contacts of clients and partners with whom you cooperate. The ability to record all calls and emails will not allow you to miss the most important moments, and the sales funnel will help you track the effectiveness of your sales department.

• HR:Personnel Management

Corporate portals make it easy to present and manage your company structure. All necessary information about employees, such as contact numbers, extension numbers, email, and so on, will always be at hand. It’s easy to see who is at work, who is absent, who is on a business trip, who is temporarily replacing whom, and who has a birthday today.

• Automation of business processes

Nothing speeds up the company’s work or saves time, as automated business processes do. The corporate portal offers to automate key business processes in the company. Routine operations such as business trips, vacations, approval and payment of bills can be completed many times faster.

Who needs a corporate portal and why?

A corporate portal is, first of all, a very convenient tool for companies with a large number of remote employees or a branch structure. Where people are not located within the same office or move around a lot due to the nature of their work. The corporate portal can serve as a mobile workplace for them. But for companies with permanent staff and a single location, a corporate portal will be very useful for the following reasons:

1. Saving working time

Find and process the information you need faster. Communicate more effectively with colleagues and speed up the completion of assigned tasks.

1. Increase employee productivity

With the help of a corporate portal, everyone will always be aware of what they need to do and in what time frame. Working groups will allow us to do this more efficiently, and all accumulated knowledge will be accumulated and transferred within the company.

1. Optimize business processes

Let your documents and information literally fly around your organization, rather than crawling from office to office.

1. Gain control and manageability

You can always be aware of who is where, what they are working on and for how long. Feedback to employees will become much faster and more effective.

1. Improve the quality of management decisions and business efficiency

Reporting on the completion of tasks, and analysis of employee workload will help you make better decisions. As a result, the quality of the company’s work and its competitiveness will increase.

Selection and implementation of a corporate portal

At the moment there are perhaps three options to choose from:

1. Purchasing a ready-made boxed solution
2. Corporate portal as a cloud solution
3. Portal development from scratch (custom solution)

Each option has its pros and cons, so the final decision depends on the size of the organization, its tasks and implementation goals.

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Intranet, an intra-company information and communication network, provides unique opportunities for working with personnel. This is an effective tool for creating a corporate culture, transmitting corporate standards, and managing information flows and business processes. This article presents the real experience of creating a corporate portal in a large holding company.

Why did we need a corporate portal?

The company I came to work for a year ago is a structure that has a branch network in a number of regions of the country, as well as subsidiaries and dependent companies (including abroad). The organization is young, with a dynamically developing corporate culture, emerging traditions and business processes in need of systematization.

Good for companies where the number of employees is small. He moved from office to office, gathered everyone at a corporate party, shook hands with everyone and resolved all issues in informal communication. And when you have many more than a hundred employees? That’s right, you can’t shake everyone’s hand... Therefore, one of the priorities in my work was the development of effective internal corporate communications. Of course, the goals were to make information flows and processes of corporate culture development manageable, to transmit uniform standards and operating principles, to increase the degree of employee satisfaction with work, and to develop the principles of social partnership between employees and management. And so we decided to use a corporate portal as one of the tools for implementing these tasks.

According to the plan, the user basis of the portal should have been... communication, and all other processes could be based on this. You are probably surprised, because usually most companies begin to create a corporate “virtual environment” with business processes. But if, at the first stage, you implement, for example, a document flow or a reporting system through the portal, then most employees will consider this an “obligation” and an “increase in the volume of operations.” (It is no coincidence that the implementation of all kinds of “ACS” - automated personnel management systems is so difficult.) If you first offer people an analogue of a social network, the use of which is fully encouraged, then the process will go completely differently.

Communication itself - both business and informal - is extremely important for people. It is in our interests to make this communication structured and secure. After all, if employees make up for the lack of communication by “chattering” on business topics on the Odnoklassniki website (and we are not able to prohibit them from visiting social networks during non-working hours), then this is a huge risk of leakage of commercial information.

Spend can't save

Having convinced ourselves of the importance of implementing a corporate portal, before approaching management with proposals for project financing, we decided to analyze the options that the market offers us. It turned out there were three of them. The first is to invite web developers to create a reasonable shell from scratch; then hire several programmers to create new sections of the portal. The development time for an internal website in this case is not short. In addition, increasing the payroll, especially during a crisis, is a dubious undertaking.

The second option is to buy a platform that already has certain foundations for creating a corporate portal. In my practice in one of the organizations, I have already encountered a similar solution: they installed a platform, management required reporting through this resource, but it was not popular because it was not socially oriented.

Yes, this platform will be functional (for example, in terms of interaction with various office applications), but in order for it to become a corporate portal with a “human face,” you will have to work hard. Specialists will be needed - “narrow professionals”, and they will be with fire during the day... They themselves understand this, and the company is forced to overpay them. The cost of implementing such solutions can be about 1.3 million rubles.

Option three is to buy a ready-made portal solution based on a unique designer with an intuitive interface that would allow you to manage a corporate portal without special knowledge of programming and HTML layout. Install this “designer” yourself (or with the help of the supplier’s technical support), integrate users and gradually fill and modernize this solution in accordance with your ideas and needs. The cost of such an undertaking costs from 35 thousand rubles. and depends on the number of resource users.

We took exactly this path - we chose a ready-made portal solution, developed on the basis of web technologies, from a supplier that has proven itself well in this area.

Technical essence

I will not burden my colleagues with terminology and technical details. I will only say that the “web constructor” we purchased consists of elements familiar to all Internet users - such as search, tags, blogs, social services, etc. These are simple and familiar tools to almost any person, but no one ever I didn’t teach how to work with search networks or social networks. So it turned out that these same principles are easily transferred to the corporate environment, helping to work with information - accumulate it, publish it, search for it, use it.

In general, technologies used on the Internet are now actively penetrating the field of personnel management and corporate knowledge management. By the way, in the West this direction even received a separate name - Enterprise 2.0.

Economic justification

1. Saving working time:
   • the costs of searching for information needed at a particular moment will be reduced;
   • loss of corporate information is minimized;
   • the company’s business processes will be significantly accelerated;
   • problems with communications between employees will disappear;
   • new staff will adapt faster.
2. Business Process Optimization:
   • employees will work together on documents using a document management system;
   • the company will significantly save on the speed of operations;
   • horizontal connections between departments will become much more effective;
   • the need for business trips is minimized due to the geographically distributed structure of the company.
3. Improving the quality of management decisions:
   • in working groups it will be possible to discuss and adjust joint plans;
   • the results of the work of employees and departments will become transparent;
   • Employees will be able to find solutions to typical business problems in the corporate knowledge base.
4. Improving employee efficiency:
   • staff will be aware of what is happening in the company and divisions;
   • work experience will begin to accumulate in the corporate knowledge base;
   • knowledge will be reused and transferred within the company;
   • working groups will be able to work together on projects and documents;
   • personnel will be constantly trained and undergo professional retraining.
5. Ensuring control and manageability:
   • the work process of all departments of the company will become transparent;
   • internal correspondence of employees will be under control;
   • Internet access can be limited;
   • the internal messaging system on the portal will replace ICQ and other Internet messengers;
   • employment and absence of employees can be monitored;
   • Feedback to staff will become faster and more effective.
6. Business efficiency:
   • the quality of work and customer service of the company will improve;
   • the company's competitiveness in the market will increase;
   • The company's image will rise in the eyes of employees, clients, partners and investors.

As allies for the implementation of a corporate portal in the company, we attracted the developers of the purchased product, as well as their methods for calculating efficiency.

Our colleagues reasoned like this: a corporate portal is a solution for saving resources and increasing employee productivity. How can savings be measured? In money, of course. Money saved is money earned. If we talk about the work of employees, then money is their time. When people spend less time searching for information needed to do their job and more time doing the job itself, the company wins. When each employee saves at least 5 minutes of time a day by using the portal’s capabilities... Calculate for yourself how much 5 minutes of working time costs, depending on the payroll.

Compare how much it will cost to implement a corporate portal with the effect of saving just 5 minutes of working time for all employees per year and you can calculate the profitability of implementing this solution. This, of course, is casuistry, but with management and economists we need to speak in the language of facts and figures.

At the intersection of professions

How much do HR specialists who initiated the implementation of the portal need to understand technical issues? I will answer this: it is necessary, at least superficially. This will help to bypass possible obstacles both from your own IT services and from providers. We need to somehow resist their “shamanism.” Imagine: a specialist comes, “beats the tambourine,” pronounces phrases in a language that is incomprehensible to the personnel officer, more like spells, and demands decent money for it according to the principle “incomprehensible means smart, and therefore expensive.”

No, my dears, everything ingenious is simple. Self-respecting providers are extremely transparent. Moreover, competent developers try to simplify the task as much as possible for future users, and particularly professional companies even create a virtual laboratory that allows you to “touch” their product. But we need to understand what to “feel”, right?

Another important point is the update system. If you purchase a product and are told that immediately after integration all corrections and updates will be paid, then it is better to refuse such a product. This will obviously entail additional expenses and dissatisfaction with management. A reliable provider will provide updates free of charge for a certain period - usually one year.

* * * As for the HR manager, during the period of implementation of the corporate portal it is better for him to forget about a quiet life (if he had one). This process requires patience, interest in innovation, creativity and a willingness to work overtime. By the way, in return you can acquire new useful skills and revive interest in work.

Now let's talk about the “stuffing” of the corporate network.

Good for those companies whose staff numbers are small. He moved from office to office, gathered everyone at a corporate party, shook hands with everyone and resolved all issues in informal communication. And when the number of employees exceeded a hundred? And it’s no secret that, in addition to performing work duties, communication is extremely important for people - both informal and business. And this is where the Intranet comes to the rescue.

Sections and functions of the corporate portal can be conditionally combined into the following blocks:

1. Company introduction:
   • general information about the company, its history, objectives, values ​​and corporate culture;
   • official news feeds (orders, regulations, rules);
   • company events calendar;
   • photo and video reports on the company’s activities;
   • a feed of important industry news;
   • internal company vacancies;
   • contacts and details for quick access.
2. Representation of company employees:
   • a unified directory of company employees;
   • quick search for information about an employee (by alphabet, by structure, by parameters);
   • customizable employee card (photo, contacts, area of ​​activity);
   • quick contact with an employee (web chat, e-mail);
   • control of employee presence on the portal;
   • information about employee absence, absence calendar;
   • lists of new employees and personnel changes, Honor Board, birthdays;
   • employee personal account with expanded capabilities (personal documents, photo and video materials, blog, personal calendar, etc.).
3. Enterprise Information Management:
   • libraries of office documents with collective access and the ability to work through a browser and explorer;
   • working with portal documents using Microsoft Office;
   • portal materials document flow system;
   • version control of portal documents;
   • restriction of access to documents;
   • management of multimedia materials (photo, video).
4. Corporate search:
   • full-text search of all information posted on the portal in Russian and English;
   • tag search and tag cloud;
   • support for Russian and English morphology;
   • instant indexing of updated and new documents;
   • taking into account employee access rights when displaying search results;
   • advanced search query language;
   • federated search: providing search results of different types for one request (news, employees, documents, etc.).
5. Teamwork and social networks:
   • creation of working or project groups for joint discussion and solution of production and non-production problems;
   • using the principles of a social network in organizing collaboration;
   • flexible configuration of group functionality and access rights for different groups of employees;
   • calendar of events for the group and its members;
   • organizing group meetings;
   • discussion of work issues (forums, web messenger);
   • tasks and instructions to group members, planning, execution control;
   • task completion reports from group members;
   • document library for the group, version and change control, working with the group document library through Windows Explorer and office applications;
   • photographic materials of the group.
6. Business processes:
   • document flow of content on the portal;
   • customizable web forms (creating electronic requests with the required fields), assigning employees responsible for processing;
   • automation of application servicing in the Help Desk system, control of application processing;
   • organizing working (project) groups with assigning tasks and monitoring their implementation;
   • organization of meetings, invitations and confirmation mechanism, meeting reports;
   • booking meeting rooms (and any other premises).
7. Intracorporate communications:
   • instant messaging within the portal (analogous to ICQ);
   • calendars of events at different levels with the possibility of mutual integration;
   • meetings/alerts;
   • open and closed thematic forums;
   • personal and public photo galleries;
   • employee surveys and surveys;
   • interactive features: surveys, reports, external RSS feeds on the portal;
   • automated system for receiving and processing requests with the ability to view status.
8. Employee training and testing:
   • creation of an unlimited number of training courses;
   • questions based on the lesson results, self-test;
   • personnel testing log taking into account the points scored by the user when passing the test, a list of attempts;
   • automatic determination of results;
   • flexible system for distributing access rights to training courses.

Naturally, every employee does not need all this at once, so our corporate portal contains a flexible configuration function - each user can create their own individual desktop by simply dragging or hiding information blocks.

If the company has a vertically integrated structure, then on the portal you can create sections for a higher and subordinate structure and limit the access of each structure to the sections of the portal. You can place the reporting generation system on the portal, record the timing and quality of report preparation. The personnel officer who submitted such an idea will not be priced.

For the normal functioning of the portal, it is necessary to take measures to ensure the security and protection of access channels to this information resource. If personnel officers do not foresee this, they will have opposition from the security service, and if there is none, then they simply risk harming their company. Therefore, if external providers are involved in the implementation of this project, in order to receive remote technical support, simultaneously with signing the contract, you should sign an agreement or obligation on non-disclosure of personal data and information posted on your portal.

After approval of this project, allocation of funds and acquisition of all necessary components, we installed this resource on the server, and further work was divided into several stages.

At the first stage, the ready-made structure proposed by the developer was modernized by us using the designer built into the system and filled with content. After this, users of the parent organization were integrated into the portal system.

At the next stage, the corporate portal worked in test mode. During trial operation, the portal’s functions were adapted based on the needs of the company’s structural divisions in optimizing business processes. With the participation of an IT specialist, the portal was supplemented with new features and solutions.

The third stage is connecting remote users from branches. Thus, we wanted to gradually form in all employees a holistic perception of ongoing business processes and increase each employee’s sense of involvement in the tasks implemented by the company.

In fact, a virtual company office is now being created, where employees can go from anywhere and at any time.

Are you constantly late? We'll show you!..

If someone thinks that it’s enough to get the equipment, deploy a system of pages, functions and services on it and everything will start to work, everyone will become the happy owner of a tool from the HR department, then he is mistaken.

In addition to various technical problems, there may be difficulties associated with changing the internal corporate culture. Like any innovation, the portal requires adapting the perception of employees to use its capabilities at work. Everyone is more accustomed to working “as before,” and it will take time for more and more employees to understand the benefits of the system being implemented.

Since the process of changing corporate culture is a rather lengthy thing, even now we are trying to use all forms and methods of “embedding” the portal into the life of the company. We avoid “out of the blue” methods, but supplement this resource with convenient services and gradually integrate the use of the portal into the rules and regulations. For example, not long ago we sent a message from the portal to all employees: “Are you constantly late? We will show you!..” Reports showed a surge in visits. Employees rushed to see if punitive measures were being introduced for being late to work? Following the link, they discovered news that a new service had been added to the corporate portal - urban transport routes, which would show them how to get from point A to point B faster.

We came to the idea (no matter how much we hated it) that employees would be more willing to go to a corporate portal to study the menu in the canteen than “a presentation of strategic objectives extrapolated against the backdrop of convergence of economic bases, and a cluster-focus analysis of existential symbols of the modern economy.” , For example. Employees are people, and people want recognition. Therefore, we organized the opportunity to tell everyone about our hobbies, gave everyone the opportunity to express “their authoritative opinion” on a number of issues, and placed a plaque of honor with photographs.

Gradually, along with all these external attributes, the portal is filled with components that are much more important for business development. Our partners have already become interested in this solution and are inviting us to exchange experiences with the aim of introducing the same tool.

• Corporate culture

Keywords:

1 -1

2. As intended.

• B2C (Business-to-Consumer) -Automated e-commerce systems in which the seller is a legal entity (enterprise, organization) and the buyer is an individual.
• B2B (Business-to-Business) - Automated e-commerce systems in which legal entities (enterprises, organizations) act as subjects of the sales and purchase processes.
• B2E (Business-to-Employee) - Internal corporate systems for organizing the work of company personnel, individual structures or divisions.

Corporate portals B2C, B2B, B2E include corporate portals EAP, EIP, EKP, however, on the basis of the latter, it is possible to build various other systems.

Based on the above, the corporate portal is designed to solve the following main tasks:

1. Creation of a company information base with a system for classification and information extraction.
2. Providing unified (a regular browser that does not require any special client software) personalized access in real time to corporate information and applications to company employees, as well as authorized customers, suppliers and partners of the company, regardless of their territorial location.
3. Ensuring real-time teamwork among company employees, as well as authorized clients, suppliers and partners of the company, regardless of their territorial location.

First point solves the issue of entering, storing and retrieving information. In many companies, the number of cabinets and folders with various information scattered across various departments exceeds the limit when it is generally possible to find the required information (and lying in one of the folders of one of the cabinets in one of the departments) in the allotted time. And even worse, when you can find outdated, irrelevant information, take it as relevant and use it when making decisions.

Second point solves the issue of access to information, access that does not depend on the territory and time of day, but is strictly personalized. Each user can see and receive only the information to which he has been granted access.

Third point solves problems of collaboration, those tasks that traditional corporate systems cannot solve without the use of Internet technologies, i.e. without using corporate portals. These corporate portals can be used as separate subsystems of corporate systems or as independent stand-alone applications.

The only limitation of the corporate portal is the availability of Internet access, but mobile Internet and satellite Internet practically remove all territorial restrictions. In addition, the corporate information portal is a cross-platform solution that also does not depend on either hardware or applications.

The above definitions and the ensuing problems have practically no boundaries. Indeed, in principle, based on a unified browser, you can create a corporate information system for a company of any size. Moreover, maybe this would have been the case if Internet technologies had appeared twenty years earlier.

Based on all the known definitions, types of portals and the tasks that are assigned to them, we will give the following general and brief definition.

The corporate portal is web- a company portal containing corporate information and services, and providing personalized access to them for company employees and other authorized users.

In fact, this definition sets only two mandatory criteria by which an application can be classified as an enterprise portal:

1. Webinterface
2. Personalized access

In all other respects, complete freedom is provided, which explains the numerous types and scales of corporate portals.

In addition to this article, you can look at the topics of the current section:
6 articles in the "Encyclopedia" section
in the "Articles" section.
in the "History" section.
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