Intranets may be remembered as one of the biggest fails in corporate software. How many companies spent tons of money, resources and effort in building these shiny (almost perfect) new digital workplaces to discover only a few months later these two cold facts?
These two facts combined retro-feed each other generating desertion. Resulting in intranets 1.0 looking like the following image:
What happened with all this initial excitement about a new way to work? Well… it simply turned out to be that people had their jobs to do. They were not ready to pay attention to something "on top of their daily workload". Then something strange happened a few years ago. When every internal communication or HR manager out there was about to give-up on Intranets, Enterprise Social Networks appeared. They got quite crowded. Even more amazing considering the top management were not promoting them. They were just grass root projects by technology enthusiasts. Most managers were left scratching their heads… Why are employees self-motivated to use Enterprise Social Networks and not the Intranet we have built?
Again here employees are just wanting to get their job done. Enterprise Social Networks have communication and collaboration dynamics that allow them to work more efficiently. They also offer more subtle advantages like social reputation or gamification that become powerful adoption triggers.
So how can we fix this? In medium and big organizations, intranets have an important purpose of conveying internal communication, HR policies, access to business critical tools and more. The optimal solution is to mix these two worlds in a unified solution that brings social collaboration to every corner of the Intranet. Intranets with social at heart.
The social Intranets offer the right mix between:
The latest reports show that this is the direction that innovative corporations are heading. Nielsen Norman Group annually publishes a report about the 10 best Intranets worldwide. Many winners of the 2013 edition were Social Intranets. Beezy is powering the most advanced of them in terms of social integration: ONO, a leading provider of telecommunications services. Here is an excerpt from the report about ONO realizing a social intranet: “ONO’s intranet team integrated a social networking and collaboration tool throughout the site (=Beezy). It turned a dated intranet of a company using email into an engaging site that encouraged social collaboration reflecting a corporate cultural change.”
Are you running SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013 and you are planning to build the right Intranet this time? In that case you will enjoy the content of our free whitepaper: The 4 Enablers of a Social Intranet.
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