Today’s intranet portals serve many purposes, from corporate communications to collaboration and business productivity. But more and more organizations are beginning to look for ways to modernize their intranet platforms and provide a richer, more collaborative end user experience.
Here are three ways that organizations today are modernizing intranet platforms:
- Knowledge Management – rapid advances in technologies, including the internet, have resulted in a virtual waterfall of data and information being shared across organizations. Leveraging your intranet platform as a central foundation for housing and sharing this information enables a more collaborative experience for end users. Your intranet platform can be used to share information vital and important to all employees. It can also be used to facilitate knowledge sharing across departments. You may already be using your intranet to share corporate-driven messages or information such as healthcare benefits or employee handbooks. But think about enabling employees from other areas such as IT or marketing to share relevant and timely information too. IT could use the intranet to create a wiki page explaining how employees can navigate an upcoming system upgrade. Or perhaps marketing publishes a blog post about an upcoming advertising campaign, so employees can share with customers or partners. Today’s intranet portals make it easier for end users to publish their own content. They also improve the ability to effectively curate and search content, making that information easier to find. These features are driving more organizations to enable knowledge management as a core intranet feature.
- Team Collaboration – yet another area of tremendous growth throughout organizations today is workplace collaboration. Effective collaboration tools enable your employees to easily communicate across departments, office locations or even remotely. A study by Stanford several years ago showed that collaboration can have a positive impact on employee performance. With modern intranet features such as message boards, discussion forums, live chats and status updates, your intranet portal can be the gateway to dynamic employee interactions. They can help connect employees across departments or even across continents. Intranet portals can also serve as a virtual project management tool. Project or department-specific sites enable key stakeholders to work together collaboratively on projects, regardless of their location. This improves business productivity by negating the need for face-to-face interactions or calls to keep projects moving. Today’s intranet portal should serve to connect your mobile, and often global, workforce. It should be as nimble as your organization. This is why forward-thinking companies are leveraging their intranet portal to better equip employees to connect from anywhere, anytime.
- Portal for Company Tools – by deploying some of the features above, your intranet portal will serve as a virtual hub for employee communications and collaboration. A place where employees can search and locate the information they’re looking for. Or share expertise and knowledge with colleagues across the organization. By providing a reliable and enhanced experience, employees will rely on the intranet as vital to their day-to-day work. This is why leading organizations today are also leveraging their intranet as a gateway to business-critical tools, applications and processes. Bringing these tools together through your intranet enables end users to connect to their entire digital workplace from a single point.
While these are some of the top ways that organizations are evolving their intranet, they are not the only ways. Increasingly, more and more organizations are seeking to leverage advanced features to ensure their intranet delivers more value. To learn more about portal trends and best practices, download our recently published guide, “Trends in Intranet Modernization” by clicking here or by filling out the form below.
This is a great article summarizing the ways organizations are modernizing there intranet system. I would like to add more to this, I believe organization who are looking to modernize their intranet should also look for features like personalization, gamification, usage monitoring, mobility etc.