How to Improve Productivity with Social Intranet

Social intranet is a platform that supports two-way dialogue among employees by facilitating cross-organizational collaboration. In other words, the center of the social intranet is people instead of content and process, therefore it should be designed in a way which gives employees the freedom to interact with each other in ways that make sense to them.

Intranets have evolved over the decades from being a simple publishing platform to a richer and interactive enterprise solution. The infographic below depicts the evolution of the Enterprise Intranet from 1990s to 2010s.
 

Based on the illustration above, the primary goal is to develop organizational intelligence by driving efficiency and cost savings in the most collaborated way.

The Fundamental Attributes

If your team is distributed across multiple locations and time zones or simply highly mobile, then there is no doubt that the people in your organization would want to know what’s the latest & greatest, who is working on what, where their colleagues are located at that moment, if the other team members have seen their latest post, and so on.

So, here are the fundamental attributes that can make your social intranet a better place to collaborate:

• Team and business unit collaboration spaces

• Microblogging

• Allowing information to easily flow vertically as well as horizontally

• Enabling employees to promote any content by rating, liking, sharing or commenting

• Real-time aggregation of content via streams and newsfeeds

• Powerful advanced search

• User-centered and customized interface

• Location tracker by IP

Roadblocks with Intranets

If having a social intranet is said to be so important, then why do we still see so many enterprises without intranet adoption?  Well, I couldn’t agree more with Jane McConnell as she points out 5 reasons behind this issue at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris. Check out her slide below!

 

Intranet Trends for 2016

 

1. The Internet of Things (IoT) Technology 

 

The Internet of Things (IoT) Technology is an environment in which objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers such as electronics, software, sensors, etc. and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. It basically means any object such as a heater can be connected to the internet to monitor its content. To learn more about IoT, I highly recommend reading Falcon-Software’s blog post written by President and CSO, Gary Eisenstein.

This technology is very important especially for the supply chain industry, as the appropriate employees can easily track in real-time how things are moving and communicate with each other at the same time. As a result, organizations embracing IoT technology are becoming more efficient through effective internal communication and increasing their productivity.  In 2016, we will see IoT breakthrough and closely affect social intranets.  
 

​2. ​Mobile Friendly Intranets with User Interfaces (UI)

 

Some of you may recall this phrase from our previous blog post regarding mobile content management. We went on by explaining how mobile devices are being used to share corporate documentation and many employees are using their own personal devices. The discussion progressed with companies saying they are going to try to embrace digital change and allow their employees to use their own mobile devices with the rule in place that employees would need to ensure the organization’s content is secure. Since mobile device adoption emerged in the past few years and became a primary concern for designers, companies have started to update their intranets and re-design them to be more mobile-friendly. This trend will keep emerging in 2016 as well. Also simpler interfaces will work best when it comes to touchscreen displays.
 

3. Collaboration Tools

  

As we mentioned on the previous blog post, 5 Content-Based Technology Predictions for 2016, analysts say SaaS will become the default model as the social-collaboration technology this year. Therefore, we will see even greater collaboration tools that will help us to leverage productivity over the intranet. Also, the CEO of New Intranet, Robin D. Havre states “he expects to see intranets integrated very powerful collaboration tools such as project management SaaS, slack in very near future.”

To learn more about intranets and social collaboration grab your seat at INTRA.NET RELOADED BOSTON 2016 which is the biggest digital intranet workplace and social collaboration event in the US.

There is another great reason to attend the event!

Because we had so much fun at the event last year, CMS-Connected will be at the event again this year as a media partner and we will be recording the April CMS-Connected Show with a live audience! Snag your seat and be a part of the fun and insightful CMS-Connected production.