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It’s a reality that not all intranets have lived up to earlier expectations, perhaps. You may be in the position of a lot of organisations and have the intranet owned by the IT department, or perhaps Marketing, with little involvement or buy-in from other parts of the business. It might be very static, getting updated with new information as little as once a month. Probably all the good information you have there is not always easy to retrieve. All too often we have seen intranets that started out with a real mission to help staff and customers better communicate get out of date very quickly and end up as glorified company ‘news’ sites with a telephone directory attached.
To truly engage, your intranet needs to be much more fluid than that – a real community bulletin board and meeting place. This is after all what blogging and a lot of the Web 2.0/new media chat is about, too. People are now using social networking sites such as YouTube, Bebo, Facebook and so on every day - and they may also have experienced how easy it is to manage and produce their own content also, using blogs and wikis, even if it’s just looking up things on Wikipedia.
Any company online site that doesn’t keep pace with the demands of users will fail. Organic, flowing and daily dialogue with customers – by which we mean in a two-way, interactive, back and forth fashion - is not just possible, it’s beginning to be an expectation. If you are not using your intranet to engage with the people who care about your business, from customer to partner to supplier to staffer, then you are wasting such a site’s potential.
Before you rush off and try again, be warned that the intranet is not the place for safe, slick corporate communications. People want to hear what the Managing Director thinks yes, but do they want the PR version or the message that sounds like it’s from the heart? That’s what will engage people. It may not be as slick as the old version you tried, but it’s real - and anything else will push people away, not invite them in. This kind of dialogue is about building the equivalent of the town square online – a place where people can meet and participate. Companies like Microsoft understand this. Not only have created the engine to make this kind of dialogue possible with the latest revs of SharePoint, but Microsoft has also fully embraced the philosophy of Web 2.0 and the social networking ideal. Look at its own practice: it has encouraged everyone in the organisation to blog, build a community and join the debate. It seems to have worked; Microsoft now has over 4,000 such bloggers communicating away with the outside world, and not always toeing the company line, interestingly.
The benefits of this kind of conversation and engagement can include:
o Faster, more powerful, more relevant discussions lead to higher productivity
o Giving all staff and managers the ability to access the right information, in the right way, helps the employee do a better job, and faster
o The ability to work together better, make effective business decisions and produce results, particularly when multiple employees and/or multiple locations are involved, is a huge bonus
o Reduced costs: minimising travel costs and costs of finding and disseminating information (via things like less email duplication)
o Building richer relationships with new and existing customers can align with the strengthening of partner relationships and improved partner communication
o Access to business intelligence, using data catalogues and the Performance Point Server tool
o You can retain knowledge in a secure place, not just in peoples’ heads – see how a wiki can quickly become a tool for storing documentation, etc
o Single point of access to line of business applications from a single location
o Key aid in assisting companies with compliance and regulatory issues The message is clear: the ideal delivery platform for the benefits of Web 2.0 is an reinvigorated company intranet, jazzed up with new thinking based on the latest in what Microsoft SharePoint technology can deliver.
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