A modern intranet is by no means a stretch of the imagination. In fact, it’s rather a lot less complex and thought-provoking as you might first anticipate. Every modern style intranet definition will rightly include a social element…but how this social feature functions is the true test of its place on your intranet. By social, we want an intranet to encourage frequent collaboration with others on tasks, projects and documents etc. This might be in the form of discussion, commenting, forums, following and the ability to favourite people within your organisation and the content they produce. This method of working promotes continual engagement with one another across your intranet platform.
Discovery through search is also knocking very hard on the door of the modern intranet. Surely it cannot be considered modern at all without a sophisticated search facility? Users want answers and information, and they want it at their finger tips. The more productive and discoverable content is through search the more interactions you will see from your intranets users as a source of information. By being able to build your search functionality and manipulate results to users you can control its projection out to the business.
Being open and innovative. By using open source and cloud services you are allowing your intranet to receive more frequent and iterative updates and functionality. Rather than being locked in to software that requires manual updates you are free to pick and choose additional functionality or code to implement that you may benefit from. This can add value to different departments that may be asking for different aspects of functionality.
An advance of a modern intranet should be to make complex communications simple. Not the other way around whereby outdated and inefficient intranets have been known to make very simple functionality operate in the most confusing and frustrating way, causing a repelling nature between user and intranet platform.
So very briefly, in order to define a modern intranet, it needs to adopt a social way of working, have a powerful search, be open to innovation and updates, but most above all it needs to encourage regular interaction from users through its ability to simplify complex processes and operations an organisation might experience. Saving both time and money through an efficient and engaging intranet at any level of business is indispensable.
Charlie
