With the rise of enterprise collaboration software and the wave of new innovations for enterprise communication and collaboration, there’s just one conclusion: intranet & enterprise 2.0 is friggin cool. And it can make a hugely positive difference within your organisation.
1. Every employee needs an accessible digital profile
A profile page is the key element to any succesfull (social) intranet. There are just too much benefits of digital profiles to list them all. Many times I see pages with tables featuring contact details for the staff’s department. People come and go, phone numbers change and within no time the page is outdated. Or people searching for someone to answer their question. With profiles and a good profile search, this can save employees masses of time. Groups can be identified and targeted with the right content.
2. Enable instant messaging
Instant messaging is a key element to succesfull short chats between one or more employees on different locations. Use IM if you want to diminish the huge amounts of e-mail conversations and chat in realtime with each other. Try to incorporate IM in your intranet to make the intranet a “total communication platform” without the hassle of people using different IM software.
3. Bring the cloud to the desktop
Many people think about websites when they think about cloud computing. And websites are far away, far from my desk and from my computer. By enabling IM, document sharing and collaboration and update feeds on through a desktop tool, you will serve employees “the cloud experience” without having to visit the intranet all the time.
4. Mobile access will become even more important
Mobile working will become even bigger with the continuous rise of smartphones. How many times did you needed a document, but you couldn’t acces it, because you were not “inside the network”. Then you have to call a colleague to ask if he/she could send it to you. Or you needed a colleague’s phone number, but those details were inside the intranet and you couldn’t access it from the outside. Get your intranet ready for mobile access! Smartphones and tablets are used by alot of your employees, so go service them when they need the data.
5. Educate, train, support and stimulate your users
People get SAP-training, communication training, manamagement training, but usually the intranet has a couple of helppages and that’s it. Digital skills and knowledge for employees is incredibly important. Not only for the complany, but also for the employees themselves. You are not teaching them a tool, but teaching them digital skills they will need in the future. Try to get a training program up and running in your company for your editors or content managers. Have regular sessions about new developments, ask for intranet input, make polls and questionnaires. Stay in close contact with your users.
Looking forward to an innovative 2011.
Five tips to make your intranet better in 2011 – tvanwaard…
This article has been submitted to IntranetLounge, a website with a collection of links to the best articles about intranets…
Great post. I agree with all your points. The challenge is to get employees to use these features. Here are two thoughts….
On the first point, supporting employee profiles. Employee profiles are the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to Intranet functionality. If employees can just know each other and their skills, connections can be made and collaboration can happen. However, getting employees to fill out their profiles can be hard. In my experience, the best strategy is through play. Make the default profile and picture really lame so employees have an incentive to change it. Hold a contest for the most elaborate or popular profile page.
On the second point, instant messaging. Most places I have worked relied on external IM services such as AIM or YIM or Skype. The reason is that most employee networks extend beyond company staff. This is a good thing. An employee whose universe is bounded by the corporate firewall cannot bring in new ideas and innovation. Because of this, the best approach for IM is to set up a Jabber server. This way employees can use a single client (iChat, Adium, Trillion, etc.) to connect with their internal and external networks. If you do this, you will have greater confidence that employees will log into the internal IM service. IRC channels (that come with a Jabber server) are also great digital “war-rooms.”