Intranets have been around for more than few decades and have evolved like any other business solution..
They are no longer set of static pages that once would just give you access to company policies ( which btw are equally important).
Intranets of today do much more than just providing access to documents. They also offer more than just collaborative working capabilities. Enhancing communication channels is one of the advantages that good intranets provides to organisations. Intranets now have become a platform to engage your staff, provide relevant services while helping get work done and forms a gateway to your digital and social workspace.
Intranet platforms are very powerful in assisting with organisation’s digital transformation and usually forms a part of larger program of work. In fact one of our customers have named their Intranet redevelopment project as – Enterprise Moderinsation program.
Intranets in the digital economy truly brings people together with information and processes allowing your staff anytime anywhere access to various line of business applications allowing them to make timely informed decision. In order to achieve this the digital workspaces needs a cohesive architecture. Various studies have revealed that in next few years many of manual repeat tasks will be automated using information and knowledge extracted from organisational data sets and organisations will prefer using visual and graph based applications for their information analysis needs. There are various tools already available in the market space that support analytical and visual representation of data.
Here are some of our recommendations to consider for your Digital workspace-
- The traditional Intranet features that have been popular are still relevant including but not limited to:
- Organisational information and communications (News/Announcements/Feedback/User Voice/ Polls/Surveys/Documents)
- Staff Search and Employee Directory including Org charts and Staff profiles
- Team collaboration (Blogs/Wikis/Team Sites/Communities/Forums)
- Dashboards providing key analytics
- Applications gateway
- Admin activities like – Timesheets / Leaves/Travel/Approvals/Onboarding
- Rich content including videos
- Search continues to be one of the most important make or break factor for your users. If they can find what they have been looking for they will come back for more. Tools like Office Graph or Microsoft Delve allow connections between staff and work related information artefacts allowing staff to follow other team members and also follow information sets for latest updates.
- Business stakeholders today discover and utilise technology on their own (and without sometimes consulting IT) to support their business outcomes. Easy access to anything from cloud based storage apps to third party products and applications has resulted in an Information Management challenge and increased data silos. Staff also bring their digital legacy along to from their previous roles. Consumerisation of IT has made us all “ tech savvy”. Your Intranet platform needs to be carefully architected to support the digital needs of your users while supporting applications framework.
- Intranet forms the landing page that allows personalised information from various LOB systems to be searchable and accessed directly and not just a place to go for hyperlinks. Try Office 365 PowerApps and Microsoft Flow and to connect to your LOB systems while allowing your business processes.
- Modern reporting and visualization tools allows to showcase your dashboards within your Intranet. Access Power BI reports directly from within SharePoint Online based intranet.
- Intranet of things (IOT) allows your intranets to connect to various in field devices allowing to tap into the vast amount of data collected and finally using that data via an analytical & visual intelligence tool to dashboard on your intranet.
- Support self service by using intelligent Bots on your intranet to assist your users with a specific service for example Level 0 support type queries. Or even helping them look for answers/information around the company. “ Do we have a social club for bike riders?”, develop a bot for your staff to book meeting rooms, their next leave and many more. Microsoft provides cognitive services and language interpreters (LUIS) to support your next bot application.
- Integrate your Document Management system to leverage organisational Knowledge and provide your users with unified experience.
- With various modern platforms (including Microsoft tool sets, SharePoint and Office 365 applications like Groups, Planner, Delve, Yammer and the latest StaffHub) Intranet today should targeted information to follow your users giving them a pleasant surprise
- Better support your staff via providing them access to relevant information and actions while on mobile rather than just a responsive design with nice design
- Enterprise Social Networks(ESN) are not just cool to have features, rather they truly support collaborative work management and helps connect people and information in a context by supporting conversations about specific information and content. Based around your organisational culture fun features like Gamification could result in team building and better supporting your staff.
- Delivering successful outcomes for any digital project needs carefully crafted change management. Adoption is the key to any business systems.
About Prometix: At Prometix, we design implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.
For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au
