Collaboration and Communications on the Intranet

The five fundamental purposes to intranets are: content, communication, collaboration, activity and culture. Each purpose plays a key role in meeting staff and organizational needs and successful intranets maintain a balance between all five.

Intranet teams benefit from having a clear picture of the current focus of their intranets, highlighting areas of strength and weakness. By focusing on improving key areas, intranet teams can transform their intranets into valuable business tools.

This article focuses on two of the five purposes and looks at where intranets are in terms of communication and collaboration. 

 

Communications

Intranets can do much to support communication and collaboration, which are now seen as integral to the success of modern organizations. Over the past few years we have seen intranets evolve in these areas from just providing news on the home page and the odd project collaboration space, to delivering tailored news, giving staff the ability to comment on, like or add to news articles, and promoting the use of social and other collaborative tools.

In Step Two’s annual Intranet Innovation Awards we have seen improvements in these areas including innovative use of team-based collaboration tools, knowledge-sharing initiatives, integration of other communication channels and uses of technologies such as blogs and wikis.

Intranet Communications Tailored to User Needs

The intranet has a clear role to play as a corporate communication channel, one that reaches most staff across the organization.

On most intranets, this consists of one or more news boxes on the home page, publishing regular items of organization-wide interest. While the intranet’s role as a communications channel is well recognized, it only delivers on this objective when the site is being regularly used, and news alone isn’t enough to draw staff to the site.

We are now seeing a move to tailoring communications to the needs of the audience with home page news including corporate messages as well as departmental, local or role-specific messages. As the intranet delivers greater business value within organizations, we see more effective use of intranet news.

Microblogging and the use of activity streams within the enterprise were prevalent among this year’s Intranet Innovation Award entries. While this is becoming standard in many intranets, success is not as common. 

Collaboration

Historically, there has been little corporate recognition of collaboration, and teams and business units were left with just email and shared network folders. Intranets acted solely as publishing and news platforms, providing access to corporate documents but not directly supporting collaboration.

The changing organizational landscape has made collaboration an imperative, to support knowledge sharing, enhance service delivery and improve competitiveness. In this year’s Intranet Innovation Award entries, we saw the continuation of the key theme that intranets were becoming increasingly "social" and more informal.

We also predicted that they would start to add more business value and this appears to be correct this year too. However, there is some way to go before social tools are truly integrated into core processes and workflow.

Social Tools Positioned Around how People Work

We are starting to see the use of social tools being positioned much more around how people work, than the value of the tools themselves. In this year’s awards, both Stockland and Coca-Cola Enterprises delivered new iterations of their intranets that integrated social tools into their homepages.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Service Economy and the New Role of the Enterprise CMS

The enterprise content management system as we know it is about to undergo a transformation and take on a new purpose.

Content management vendors have been scrambling to throw as much social technology as they can into their systems by inserting a social engagement layer on top of the existing document repositories that have long been a fundamental necessity of the modern enterprise.

But the sea change of social applications for business use was underway long before these vendors added comments, “likes” and activity streams to the CMS. What’s more interesting is to ask why they are scrambling to add social and collaboration functionality. Why have they been trying to move even closer to the end-users?

Today’s workforce increasingly makes its own choices about which applications to use for productivity and social. Consumerization and BYOD have severely limited the opportunity for existing IT-centric content management vendors to move into the social and collaboration market in any meaningful way. It’s not about selling to the IT department anymore; it’s about appealing to an entirely new type of workforce that was bred during the rise of the service economy.

Employees are calling the shots these days. There’s no doubt about that. But how are they changing the role of content management? Here are the two big trends I’m seeing.

The Reign of End-Users and the Invisible CMS

Dropbox has over 50 million users that upload over a billion files every two days. Box has 11 million active users, penetration into 82 percent of the Fortune 500 and there’s an endless influx of new “Dropbox for the enterprise” players. Evernote has 20 million users and the list goes on.

Employees are choosing their own productivity applications and the adoption rates are putting even some of the most successful enterprise applications to shame.

The traditional enterprise content management market can do little to stop this. And few consumer-workers will choose a heavy IT-centric content management system over newer, cooler options that have consumer technology DNA at their core.

As employees use an ever-increasing array of apps to do their work, the enterprise content management players are going to have to find ways to get content to the end-points (read: apps) that employees rely upon the most. Box OneCloud is a great example of this strategy in action. It puts all of your content at the fingertips of employees who spend their days in a variety of unique, but integrated applications.

If you’re a sales executive working in Salesforce most of the time, you should be able to access much of the content you need without leaving that ecosystem. Why? Because jumping through hoops to access your content interrupts your workflow, and hinders productivity.

The same goes for the VP of Marketing, who wants to access content while working in Omniture, or the Director of Operations who wants to pull up the revenue projections while working in Freshbooks so that she can save back revised data and share it with the CEO.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com