WIREDGOV

As public sector cutbacks eat deeper into middle management, local authority intranets may finally come into their own as an important tool for employee productivity.

According to Socitm’s latest briefing, Better connected intranets: is this now, at last, the time to engage? senior management who have up to now managed to avoid ‘self-service’ may find themselves using the council intranet for the first time – and not liking what they find.

This may create the incentive needed for investing more in intranets:

fixing them can be done quickly, says the briefing, by sharing best practice derived from an extensive body of evidence about what really does work. This is not complicated: organisations need to identify the most important tasks that staff carry out most often (the ‘top tasks’), and measure how long it takes to complete them. Once this ‘time and motion’ evidence is collected, it can be used to support improvement.