In today’s competitive marketplace, success is highly dependent on how easily your team can collaborate, access business information and quickly take decisions to grab a business opportunity. For effective collaboration and communication, regardless of the size or the industry, organizations have long been using corporate intranet portal where people can connect and share content with colleagues.
In this modern era of cloud computing and superfast internet connections, intranet concept is also evolving. But first let’s talk about the challenges associated with traditional intranets. The traditional form of intranet was completely forced and mandatory, where users were restricted to the office premises during office hours and over office PCs only. Employees are frustrated with the inability to access business information.
These conventional portals are only serving as a platform for static business information, outdated content and poor user experience. There is no latest and contextual content available on the portal for users, and thus organizations are unable to provide more engaging and better collaborative experience, leading employees to become disengaged and less productive at work.
Also, employees are always using social networking sites to connect with their friends and families using their smartphone, and expect similar features and experience in the corporate intranet for business purpose.
To address these common challenges, organizations considered a complete redesign of their corporate intranet but maintained the traditional approach of presenting information on the portal, thus after some time again these portals failed to engage employees to the level expected by them.
Now organizations are looking for a new intranet approach and solution, which aligns with their business objectives and ensure the best return on investment. Organizations want to provide a digital workplace for all individuals, business teams, clients, and partners to share what’s happening across various businesses, and, discuss leveraging the best to their businesses. All this to enhance the internal communication by providing a channel to interact with cross business users.
As every organization’s business needs and work culture is different, so one solution cannot fit all. There is a need of Modern Intranet approach specific to each organization for building a perfect digital workplace.
Modern Intranet approach involves following key aspects:
- Auto content aggregation, surfacing all the latest and relevant information from all sources and channels
- Content personalization, contextual information based on user’s attributes
- Ready-to-go intranet portal with minimal customization
- Flexible and quickly configurable as per business needs
- Centralization of all communications and collaboration in the organization
- Responsive design for mobile devices
- Automatic recommendations and suggestions of new things for a user
- Real-time activity feeds from all sources and channels across businesses
- Social networking to connect people, build community, and fuel participation
- Linking of all internal key business applications on the portal to make navigation fast and easier
Expect more details on these Modern Intranet aspects in my upcoming posts.
