- Walid Hamrouni
- May 30, 2018
Yes, the Intranet can be the foundation of your digital workplace!
A digital workplace is the combination of organisation, tools and people, offering harmonized and relevant solutions, at the service of business and value creation. But more importantly, it’s a change in corporate culture.
In this article, we will first discuss whether digital workplace and intranet are two mutually exclusive concepts, then we will see why the intranet can be the pillar or backbone of your digital workplace, to conclude on how we could implement it in your digital workplace.
Content
1. Intranet vs Digital Workplace really?
The digital workplace is a term that has gradually replaced the intranet that was beginning to have an aging image, nevertheless digital workplace attempts to capture a change in our relationship to work. Indeed the digital workplace offers a digital infrastructure to federate, exchange information and other business applications to facilitate the daily work of employees.
The company will therefore offer a harmonised and relevant solution for business and value creation. We are therefore witnessing a change of culture within the company, offering an environment that is more than an accumulation of tools but a place on which we communicate, cooperate and perform our tasks by connecting to each other in order to offer a better work experience.
Historically, intranets have accumulated information, interaction as well as applications, which is why, thanks to the evolution of modern intranets, we believe that they can be the foundation of your digital workplace.
2. The collaborative Intranet, backbone of your digital workplace
In an ultra connected world with at least 1 or more devices connected to the internet or interconnected by a communication network (4G, NFC,LoRa etc…), new opportunities and expectations for knowledge workers arise. Furthermore, new challenges in managing the multitude of signals coming from all sides.
This is where your collaborative intranet will come into play, in fact it can reflect your business activities if it is correctly integrated into your IS. For instance, the post of an update on a deal in your CRM or the status of your tasks in your collaboration space by your project management solution.
Your collaborative intranet will allow you to filter, contextualize and give meaning to all these signals to your employees, while giving them access to all these information at any time, from anywhere and securely with a single point of entry. This new digital hub, goes hand in hand with today’s employees aspiration to permanent connectivity, immediate access to information, remote work and flexible agendas.
Indeed, nowadays offering a solution with mobility capabilities is a must. Being able to stay up-to-date, find any relevant information or access your work tools on the go in a unified place. To do so, providing the technological support needed for enabling new work trends such as:
Remote workers who cannot show up to work every day Mobile workforce that need to meet with customers and partners Busy managers who rare sit at their desks
One solution could be to make sure that your solution provider offers an application, that will allow you to connect and use all the features of your collaborative intranet on any device, anywhere, at anytime.
Moreover a collaborative intranet should be personalized to some extent for your collaborators to find easily what they need. Now a digital workplace isn’t a fully automated company, it is more about allowing your collaborators to leverage technology. Indeed, with your knowledge on your collaborators and with the help of the solution provider of your choice, you should first build a vision. Then in a co-building approach, you could build a set of best practices such as a roll-out plan for your users, ensuring onboarding and user adoption, make sure to drive and manage it and finally set up indicators of success. By doing so, you will allow your project to be successful and have a quick ROI.
3. A unifying tool for your collaborative experience
Our vision at eXo is user-centric, when we design our solutions we put the user first, and try to offer him a sophisticated environment for him to thrive and create value. The user experience is a key success factor for a digital workplace project to succeed. Setting it around a collaborative intranet serving as a hub that reflects all your business activities and federates all your business tools facilitate this user experience, will reduce the multiplicity of tools and its complexity.
Finally, we must remember that the digital company is the promise of a change in the way we operate internally and the answer to transformations in terms of productivity and commitment knowledge management but only if we give ourselves the means by accompanying our employees in acclimatizing and using these new tools supposed to help us on a daily basis.
The scope of such a project goes beyond IT, there is a whole process of change management that needs the support of the upper management and a dedication of resources to allow your company to achieve a successful digital transformation. The digital workplace is therefore the promise of a positive change of culture and responds to important transformations in terms of knowledge management, productivity and commitment.
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FAQs
What is an intranet?
intranet is a term used with abundance whenever the subject of internal communication and collaboration is brought up which makes defining it a bit challenging. In its simplest form, an intranet is an internal website for your organization. It is used mainly for top-down communication where employees can access corporate news, policies and announcements.
What are the different types of intranet solutions?
To gather a thorough understanding of intranets and their different types, let’s walk through its history from the early days up to now:
- Intranet Portals
- Enterprise Social Netwrok (ESN)
- Intranet 2.0
What is the difference between intranets and extranets?
The main difference between intranets and extranets lays in the target audience. Intranets typically target users from a specific organization whereas extranets is the hub that can group users from multiple external organizations ranging from partners and suppliers all the way to clients
➝ Discover the real difference between intranet and extranet
What are the benefits of intranet solutions?
Different types of Intranet solutions from the early days up to the intranet 2.0 (commonly referred to as digital workplace solutions) bring a host of benefits to businesses of all sizes and industries. Below is a list of benefits often associated with intranets:
- Streamline internal communications
- Connect employees and eliminate silos
- Foster collaboration
- Improve knowledge sharing
- Recognize and reward employees
What are the different strategies for a successful intranet adoption?
Here are three different strategies for a successful intranet adoption:
- User focus strategy
- Global community management strategy
- Private communities focus strategy
- Tags: Digital workplace, intranet, workplace
I am a product marketing specialist and tech enthusiast. My role at eXo is to support marketing and operational activities for our digital collaboration tool. I will mainly blog about digital transformation, collaboration, open-source tech, and how to navigate through eXo platform.
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