In the future intranets will be all of these things in context.
At the Advanced Intranet & Portal Conference in Amsterdam, Sriram Chakravarthy, the Senior Director of Products and Engineering for tibbr presented on the future of intranets. He said modern and social intranets will give “the right information, to the right person, in the right context.” In other words, employees will not have to look far to find the content they need. It will all be in the context and flow of their work.
Based on Forrester’s State of Workforce Technology Adoption 2011 report, Sriram showed the five things employees look for from their modern or social intranet:
Earlier versions of this report showed the same factors, but a different order of priorities. It’s evident that the “information” we want from the company intranet has not changed, but the way we “consume and interact with this information” has changed. Reiterating what Sriram said, the changes can be summarized as follows:
- Distributed teams. Businesses, large and small, are becoming more global, more geographically distributed. With employees working in multiple time zones, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hold meetings where everyone can attend.
- Mobile. To give an example, as of May 2012, the number of people in India accessing information from their mobile device surpassed the number of people accessing information from their desktop. In this day and age, we expect to access everything from our mobile device.
- User Experience. Intranets should be as intuitive and easy-to-use as Facebook and applications we use in our personal lives. But currently, most intranets don’t keep up with employees’ expectations.
With these changes in mind, intranets, including social intranets, need to be redesigned to fit the way we consume information now, whether on our desktop or mobile device. To make intranets more intuitive, so employees get the most out of their experience, Sriram described the characteristics intranets need:
- Simple – “Don’t make me think!” – Intranets should be fast, easy to use, accessible from anywhere, plus easy to install.
- Mobile – “Take the intranet with you…” and get the information you need from anywhere.
- Contextual – While content may have been king in the 20th century, context will be king in the 21st century. All of the information must be served in context, when and where employees want it.
- Integrated – Fully integrated into businesses processes, the flow of your work. All updates from your business applications should be accessible from one unified interface.
- Make IT Happy – While social is important, so is meeting your organizations needs for security and governance, whether on-premise or in the cloud.
To view the full content of Sriram’s slides and learn more about modern, social intranets, visit our slideshare page.
To learn more about what tibbr can provide you, feel free to contact our expert enterprise social networking team today.
