Important ingredients for a successful intranet:
Leadership
Teamwork
Empowering employees
Optimizing activities & processes
Focusing on the needs of the customer (external)
Direction of intranets:
Portal concepts – aggregating content and tools into a single screen
Integration of applicatons – HR, business applications, collaboration spaces
Social media – user-generated content
Management awareness – senior management is slowly becoming aware of intranets
Changes in business:
Virtual teams (geographically dispersed)
New expectations
Tele-working (working remotely)
Smart phones (mobile access of the intranet)
The intranet is on the verge of breaking:
Today's typical intranet is not sustainable
Too top-down
Not business-oriented
Not people-oriented
Out-of-date
Arthritic – too hard to publish
Closed – limited to employees (closed to partners & contractors)
Sendetary – limtied to office, PCs
One out of five intranets is in stage 3 (the intranet is “the way of working” now); 43% are stage 2 (it will be “the way of working” within in 1-2 years); 1/3 hope to evolve to stage 3 within 4-5 years).
Views of Stage 1 intranet:
“Our focus this year and last year is around communication, navigation and self-service, as these are areas we have the most control over.”
View of Stage 2 intranet
“Our biggest challenge fo rnext year is to change the culture of the company to not use email for example as a communication/ collaboration medium.”
View of Stage 3 intranet
“Portal usage is include in personal KPI for our perfrmance management system. This included measurements on quality / quantity of project updates, information published, etc. This has encourage people to integrate the portal in to their respective business processes.”
Is the intranet is the main entry point to applications... (the user has to go to the intranet to get to key applications)?
Business applications & process support – 77% of stage 3 intranets; 45% of stage 2 intranets; 27% of stage 1 intranets
Management reporting, dashboards – 55% of stage 3 intranets; 30% of stage 2 intranets; 9% of stage 1 intranets
Employee life and career (HR) -- 77% of stage 3 intranets; 45% of stage 2 intranets; 27% of stage 1 intranets
Management reporting, dashboards – 90% of stage 3 intranets; 74% of stage 2 intranets; 58% of stage 1 intranets
OTHER NOTABLE FINDINGS:
Stage 3 intranets have more top leadership & operational participation in intranet steering committees.
C-level executives now participate on the intranet steering committees of half of the respondent companies that have a steering committee (about 1/3 of the respondent companies have a steering committee; roughly 1/6th of the total respondents therefore have a senior executive actively involved)
Only 45% have networks or communities of practice for content contributors
Only 36% of the organizations have “clearly designated business owners for content”
only 1% stage 1 intranets have wikis in general use (optimized); 35% are testing intranets (in some parts)
10% of stage 3 intranets have wikis in general use (optimized); 74% are testing intranets (in some parts)
2% of stage 3 intranets have wikis in general use (optimized); 30% are testing intranets (in some parts)
ADDITONAL READING:
Learning from the best intranets