Business needs have changed and new tools are available to keep up with the reality of doing business today. A social intranet can provide many benefits by transforming the one-way communication of the traditional intranet into a two-way collaboration tool. While there are many benefits of a social intranet, how do you know if those benefits will help your company meet your business needs?
Where to Start
To get the greatest value from a social intranet, figure out what tools make sense to your users and for your business goals. This plan is essential to make sure that you have what you need in place but also don’t overload users with new tools that don’t serve an obvious function.
Understand IT needs
Generally speaking, implementing a social intranet shouldn’t present major challenges for most IT departments. But you may face some lesser obstacles, depending on your situation.
For example, if your IT team is less familiar with cloud-based platforms, they may have a greater learning curve when implementing a social intranet, since social capabilities derive almost exclusively from cloud-based platforms, like Microsoft Yammer.
Adapt Existing Tools & Policies
Another potential challenge could be to seamlessly merge the social capabilities with traditional intranet features, such as document libraries and team workplaces. To be effective, the solution must be easy to use and intuitive for users.
Moving to a social intranet would also require adapting your existing information governance and policies to protect sensitive data and any information that’s subject to compliance or regulation in your industry.
Create a policy for sharing and discussing certain records in social and collaborative channels, and provide commonsense guidance for what’s appropriate for a business setting.
Get Users On Board
User adoption is an obstacle for some organizations. Often, when you roll out a new collaboration platform, such as a social intranet, a lot of people start using it at first, but gradually drop off.
Without ongoing user adoption, the implementation eventually dies. Sustaining adoption is essential for a successful social intranet. Even though the social features are intuitive for anyone who uses personal social media sites, you can’t take a “build it and they will come” attitude.
It’s important to define your business goals and use cases with a social intranet. Figuring out your use case and how it applies to your business is an important first step to creating meaningful user adoption.
Managed Change
In addition, make sure you follow sound change management principles to get employees on board with the new platform and not slide back into old habits. Change management activities include training, soliciting user feedback and creating internal champions who help to drive the project and maintain momentum.
Final Thought
To get the best return on your technology investment, people have to want to use the new intranet. When employees are eager to use a platform that improves efficiency and knowledge management while reducing costs and risk, you’re on your way to achieving a variety of business goals, from better customer service to faster product turnaround and greater creativity to reduced time to market.
Want to learn more about how to improve transparency and content findability, increase efficiency and control costs? Download our white paper, How To Build A Social Intranet That Boosts Workplace Collaboration And Employee Engagement.
