With the same ease, look up a phone number, apply for vacation time, or check your health-care benefits. Start up a chat session and talk it out online. And you get all that flexibility without huge construction costs. Most intranet tools are available in free or low-cost versions, letting you build an inexpensive prototype and then upgrade to more powerful products as you feel the need. So you get all those intranet features for far less money than what you'd pay for traditional client-server tools.
Intranets are also a great way to get used to the future.
An intranet running over high-speed Ethernet connections provides a model for what Internet access will be like in the coming years. And what you learn from your intranet easily transfers to the outside world. As a result, those policy manuals and time cards on your intranet could translate into major marketing tools when applied to the Internet. Not for now. But if you depend on tight network integration, robust management tools, and ultra-reliable links to mainframes and minicomputers, you may want to wait for a while.