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Diane Watkins has a lot to teach about her specialty selling car and homeowners' insurance. As a senior marketing specialist for State Farm Insurance in suburban Philadelphia, Watkins helps agents make the most of their sales territories. Last spring, she put her 10 best tips in writing -- and posted them to a discussion board on State Farm's nationwide intranet.

What happened next was every sales manager's dream come true: Within a few days, a dozen agents had added tips of their own to the in-house Web site. A State Farm rep in Flushing, New York, for example, explained how to get referrals in the Asian community. Other agents discussed ways to get auto-only customers to consider buying other types of State Farm insurance. By early June, more than 40 agents from across the United States had joined the discussion, and hundreds more had read the postings. Strikingly, State Farm used no gimmicks and offered no rewards to get its agents chatting. It simply created the heading "Best Practices," posted Watkins's initial remarks -- and then let its agents take over.

"Everyone wants to help out on something like this," says Owen Townsend, a technology specialist at State Farm's headquarters in Bloomington, Illinois. "People like seeing their names in print. When you contribute to something like this, you elevate yourself to the status of an expert."

Such online brainstorming may be the digital economy's most important success story this year. If there is one area where Internet technology is actually delivering more than people expected -- rather than falling short of lavish boasts -- it is in improving communications and collaboration within an enterprise. Take a peek at the intranets of the most progressive companies, and you will see a remarkable number of ways that they are using that technology to become smarter, faster, and more efficient.

In May, for example, IBM convened 52,600 of its employees online for what it called WorldJam. Using the company's intranet, IBMers everywhere swapped ideas on everything from how to retain employees to how to work faster without undermining quality.

It's not just IBM-like giants that are taking advantage of this technology; smaller enterprises are doing so as well. At organizations of almost every size, well-run intranets are transforming clerical chores and making it possible to accomplish routine tasks faster, better, and cheaper. Internal Web sites are also making it easier than ever to transmit up-to-the-minute company and industry news to employees. And they are opening up new ways for business associates in far-flung locations to brainstorm together.

So how do you build a great intranet? Fast Company spoke with smart corporate users and fast-growing builders of intranets. Here are seven crucial items that they identified.

Sweep Away Paperwork

Of all the ways to invest in technology, few beat the rapid paybacks from putting employee record-keeping online. Need to file an expense report? Turn in a performance appraisal? Add a new baby to your health plan? If you're using paper forms to do any of that, then you're getting things done in a cumbersome way that has barely evolved since the 1920s. Go online, and you'll find that all sorts of paper-processing drudgery will go away.