Every so often, my work puts me before HR folks at companies and one of the things I always ask is if the have an employee self-service portal. The answer especially in the larger companies is a "yes, we have an intranet for employees". But more often than not the contents of this portal are not much more than a lot of static content about the company, its HR policies and a collection of forms that the employees can download, print, fill and then submit manually for processing/approval.