An intranet serves a number of purposes to a variety of organisations.
Regardless of your brand, layout and platform your intranet should provide a number of features that add real business value to your organisation, your customers and your end users.
What should you consider when implementing an platform that will deliver value?
Intranet Strategic Purpose
It’s key to align the implementation of your intranet with your business objectives and consider what role it will play in achieveing those objectives.
Some common objectives that may underpin your intranet are:
- Increased communications
- Better team working
- Improved collaboration
- Gaining efficiencies
- Empowering employees
- Knowledge sharing
Whatever your strategic goals may be, ensure that your intranet supports some or all of those goals.
Intranet User Engagement
While an intranet may indeed support a higher business objective it will simply fail without focussing on your end users and their needs.
Different groups or departments will want to get a range of functionality to support them in their day to day business processes.
Considering the unique individual needs of your users and their communitites is key in offering them the right features and functionality to deliver those stratgeic goals.
Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and LinkedIn have raised the bar when it comes to user engagment and your end users will expect content to be relevent, targetted and findable. Indeed they will expect content to be pushed to them according to their role, department or community.
Your system should be able to:
- Segment people into audiences
- Target content to those audiencess
- Provide ideation and social communities
- Tailor a users experience
- Target using personalisation
- Support groups and communities
- Provide demographic and people finders
Get things done on your Intranet
The platform should be user centric and functional. People will visit your intranet in order to:
- Discover information
- Find people
- Complete a task
Moreover, they use the intranet to perform their roles and get work done. Your intranet will have to provide a blend of functions that allow users to connect to people, information and processes. A solution therefore should provide:
- A people directory
- Rich user profiles
- Forms & workflows
- Enterprise search
- LOB integration
- Content management
A culture of success
One of the most important factors of a business success is the culture of its organisation. However, this has become more complex recently with the increase in disparate, remote and distributed workers.
Therefore it is vital that your intranet represents the heart and soul of your digital workplace to support and engage your users.
Moreover, the intranet should support your company culture with:
- Brand, purpose and identity
- Onboarding experience
- Rewards & recognition
- Global and local news
- Leadership involvement
- Staff voice & feedback
Decentralise
Firstly, employees are more engaged with technology both in and out of work.
Secondly, people are comfortable with the various platforms and the self service aspects of those systems.
Moreover, enabling your employees to self serve is essential in an intranets success.
Thirdly, and importantly, your employees should be able to build team areas, communities, groups, project areas and social spaces without the need to burden your IT team.
In conclusion, decentralisation will foster a culture of communication and user generated content. Users will effectively take ownership of your intranet and create rich content and consequently knowledge and value.
An intranet is a portal that brings together people, content and knowledge. Therefore, in today’s digital world it is more important than ever to engage and empower people to get stuff done!
If you are thinking of implementing an intranet or already have one that is not delivering the benefits you thought it would then please do reach out to us.