5 risk reducing benefits of a turnkey intranet

Opportunity cost is defined as the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when a different option is chosen. Not all financial costs are obvious and budgets can be eaten up by inefficiency and lost opportunities. Adopting the ‘as a service’ model could help you to use your budgets more effectively, get more done and delight your internal customers.

How turnkey intranets help

#1. Turnkey reduces the risk of project failure

A turnkey intranet offers a highly predictable outcome for your company, in terms of both deliverables and cost, in a fraction of the time a traditional solution takes. There is no substitute for knowing exactly what you will be using, what the cost will be, and when it will be delivered.

#2. All the frills included

A subscription based ‘as a service’ intranet, such as Unily, is under continual improvement and enhancements are deployed regularly at no additional cost thereby increasing your organizations’ ability to keep pace with platform changes and industry trends. This results in increased end-user adoption and productivity and ensures the platform will be around for the long-term, growing with your business.

Consider the opportunity cost in a custom build intranet project of halting innovation because the budget has run out before the true value is ever realized?

#3. Reduced implementation time

If valuable resources could be refocused on more important business initiatives, then who knows what might be achieved? Not to mention the impact of experiencing the productivity gains of a new intranet months before a traditional custom approach. Turnkey intranets deploy in six weeks or less enabling you to get started quickly and develop your intranet maturity over time in a structured road-map. Adrian Gagala, DORMA’s global intranet manager commented that with Unily they could “Deliver access to innovation for all their people, taking them from zero to 100 in just 60 working days”. 

What is the opportunity cost of tying up a core team of five for six months or more when they end up with an intranet which is already dated at launch and costly to support and enhance?

#4. IT knowledge owned by the few

So you have a couple of seasoned pro’s in your technical team and feel that you don’t need any technical support for your new intranet? What happens if one or more of those key technical employees leaves? A common risk for the enterprise is an over reliance on the tacit knowledge of employees. Who knows how that complex custom enhancement (hack) works that now performs as a critical function for the whole business? Sleep-easy- protect unplanned spend and avoid stagnation by adopting an evergreen platform with built-in Service Level Agreement (SLA) backed support.

#5. Refocus staff on to more important tasks

What could your team do if they weren't dealing with mundane and unpredictable operational support tasks? Don’t have your technical team looking at why the intranet doesn't render properly on the next breakthrough device when they could be automating business processes, and impacting real business change. Ask yourself about the opportunity cost of not having your team working on tasks that will save people many hours a week.

Summary

While adopting a turnkey solution will always involve trade-offs when compared to a full custom project, Unily research has determined that the majority of customers want 80% of the same functionality for their enterprise intranet portal. In addition to those in plain-sight there are significant discrete benefits to choosing a platform with predictable results. Avoid the risk and opportunity costs of a custom project and choose Unily.