The returns of having your own business platform.

Knowledge readiness.

Within every industry, everyone wants to be able to stand out, and the focus here is then often on positioning the brand, the communication mix and customising the product or service. However, what is often rather underestimated is the influence that own employees have on an organisation's distinctive image. Employees' knowledge of the organisation and the relevant industry is of enormous value to the organisation.

Optimising knowledge sharing has a positive effect on knowledge readiness within the organisation. Knowledge readiness refers to the speed at which expertise and distinctive values of the organisations can be deployed.

The organisation as an oceanic iceberg.

When an unsuspecting tourist looks at an iceberg from a ship, he will say "so that's a big iceberg!". What he often does not realise is that he has literally and figuratively only seen the tip of the iceberg (10%). In fact, under the water lurks the other 90% of the iceberg, which he has not been able to observe.

Without diving equipment, he will never be able to perceive the bigger picture and will remain unsuspecting. So for the ultimate experience, he will have to go diving so that he can make a proper observation of the iceberg. This observation will then really impact his experience and once back home, he will be determined to share this experience with everyone. The tourist is no longer unsuspecting.

The iceberg stands as a metaphor for the knowledge within an organisation. Here, you should think of the entire iceberg as all the knowledge present within the organisation. The ship constitutes the office and the tourists are the organisation's employees. Without useful tools, employees will in many cases only be able to perceive and share limited knowledge of the organisation.

Make knowledge visible with a handy tool and realise knowledge readiness!

A web application as a business portal.

Quite a few applications already exist that help organisations store and share knowledge. Think of project management apps, cloud applications for sharing documents and, for example, applications for (social) interaction between employees.

However, it is often inefficient to have to work in many different applications to share and gather certain knowledge. Also, each organisation often has specific requirements that are not present as functions in a particular app. This often means that a new application will be used a lot and another application will lose popularity. This fragmentation of knowledge readiness is highly undesirable, as it indirectly has a great impact on an organisation's business performance.

Therefore, for many organisations, a customised web application as a company portal is the best solution to achieve greater knowledge readiness (the diving equipment for your company). However, this company portal must be able to change with future developments within the organisation (scalability). Some examples of functions such a company portal could have:

Manage and view the schedule.

Provide all employees with insight into the current progress and status of ongoing projects and work. This prevents a lot of unnecessary (noise) communication. Extensions are conceivable to give the end customer (limited) insight into progress as well.

• Viewable management information (dashboard with statistics)

• The most valuable information for management tightly visualised within the platform.

• Sharing documents

• All essential documents always at hand for all employees, together always the most up-to-date version.

• Easy to arrange a replacement

• A replacement module to request colleagues to fill in when one is unfortunately unable to attend.

• Push messages to colleagues (mobile push messages)

• For urgent announcements or news, quickly mobilise all colleagues.

• Shareboard for colleagues (social intranet)

• An online notice board where knowledge can be shared, such as articles and inspiring videos, or, for example, social initiatives: "anyone want to join the running race together as a company?"

• Agenda for events, courses and other highlights

• The user can register directly for these events, which avoids a lot of administrative hassle. With the push of a button, the employee can register for a company outing, course or birthday party.

• Manage and view company portfolio

• Make ongoing work and cases transparent, this can also be perfectly presented to potential clients during a company presentation.

• Poolbook

• In larger organisations, it is important that employees know how to make good use of each other's specialities and making these specialities visible is the first step! Make knowledge, responsibilities and specialities visible to everyone.