Introduction

Intranets have traditionally served as repositories for general company information, such as job openings, contact directories and holiday schedules. However, as workforce tooling has evolved to provide greater utility and a more seamless contextual experience, so too has the traditional intranet. Increasingly, intranets are evolving to act as the first point of entry for the workforce, to be a more productive, more engaging, central workforce hub. This report will discuss why an evolved intranet is needed and the components that make up a modern intranet.

The 451 Take

With many other options for enterprise-wide communication and collaboration currently available, the intranet may seem obsolete. However, several providers that have been adapting to the workforce productivity landscape argue that the modern intranet is not only relevant, but also can serve as a competitive advantage by helping enterprises run more smoothly and keeping employees engaged.

 

Why an Evolved Intranet is Needed?

As previously written, we believe that the vast majority of workers will be knowledge workers in the future, and that the distributed work environment must be able to come together to provide employees with real-time, secure access to business applications and resources, regardless of their location or the device they choose to use. This is where intranets have a role to play as central hubs for all employees, whether frontline, remote or in-office employees.

SMBs that lack adequate IT oversight often deal with the pain points of having different collaboration and communication tools being used by different leadership teams and individuals in different departments, causing the proliferation of siloes and miscommunication. With a modern intranet in place, workers can navigate around pre-established siloes and obtain insight into other areas of the enterprise while being able to share and communicate easily with those outside of their departments.

Enterprise-wide employee engagement is often seen as a nebulous, ongoing challenge. Our perspective is that employee engagement extends beyond a sense of affinity with the company brand or corporate culture, and considers employees' interactions with their work, as well as the platforms and tools they use to perform that work. Next-generation employee engagement will be built on a unified view of the employee experience within an organization. This new view of employee engagement must consider what tools and technologies employees actually want to use.

In our Voice of the Connected User Landscape: Corporate Software Survey from September 2018, 43% of respondents said that it would be 'very important' that a new employer offer devices, applications and other productivity tools to get work done if they were looking for a new job. Employees want to be productive and successful in their roles, and business leaders must look for tools that enable work and clear pathways to productivity if they want to provide a positive employee experience.

Several vendors have emerged as modern intranets by redefining their strategies and differentiating themselves by addressing many organizational needs, such as HR onboarding, file access and sharing, and dispersed team collaboration support.


This Impact of a Modern Intranet

We believe all workers are becoming, or at least should be viewed as, knowledge workers, regardless of whether they are frontline, remote or in-office desktop workers. Additionally, as knowledge work continues to evolve toward what we call a WorkOps model of workflow – seamless, context-driven workflows happening across multiple applications – productivity and work enablement should be key areas supported via enterprise intranets.

End users use intranets to stay up-to-date on company-wide information like new hire announcements, as well as details that pertain to their specific job functions, such as work schedules or deal wins. Having a well-integrated, centralized workforce hub where vital personalized information and documents are located, along with additional data that is relevant to a particular employee, can greatly impact an organization's productivity. Cutting down on internal emailing or messaging for questions regarding locating the right document or obtaining employee directory details alone saves time and alleviates miscommunication.

Expanding upon the above-mentioned productivity-enhancing features by enabling coworker collaboration and providing actionable information is the aim of modern intranets. Some vendors offering modern intranets include Confluence, which has history in the space and brand recognition, and Unily, which has evolved in the last few years to offer deeper content and experience management, social advocacy, and analytics. Structural and Happeo are vendors that focus on data accessibility, contextual team alignment and collaboration enablement. Additional players include Liferay, Simpplr and Jostle. However, these vendors don't all specifically categorize their offerings as 'intranet only,' and sometimes use terms such as 'internal network platform,' 'centralized collaboration' or 'an enterprise social network.'


The Components that Make Up the 'New' Intranet

Easy to use: A modern intranet dashboard should have all the information that is relevant to a specific user. Additionally, that information should be organized in a manner that is easy to navigate and highly searchable. The intranet should serve as the information home base for an employee regardless of their specific role in an organization. If a dashboard is too cluttered or cannot be customized to an employee's needs, there is very little draw for employee usage.

Not IT-department-reliant: For companies that are smaller and don't have a dedicated IT team, or companies that simply don't want to allocate IT resources and time to an intranet rollout, it is necessary for a modern intranet provider to offer a noncomplex out-of-the-box solution. Administrators should be given oversight and management control, assured security, training, and ongoing support so that IT departments don't become intermediaries.

Integrated: With so many existing workforce apps that employees rely on to accomplish day-to-day tasks, it is imperative that intranets be well integrated with other apps (document sharing, messaging, sales force tooling, HR, payroll, etc.). The intranet should not function as a stand-alone repository, but as an interconnected hub that works well with existing tools.

Scalable: Company growth and organization goals fluctuate and change, and intranets need to be able to accommodate those changes over time. This means that providers should be flexible and offer customization of control settings, full mobile accessibility and ongoing updates that serve the needs of their clients. Additionally, providing B2E, B2B and B2C scenarios that simplify third-party or contract workflows is also vital as organizational needs evolve.


Outlook

The term 'intranet' has somewhat of a negative connotation in the workforce landscape, which means that the players shaking up this market need to be clear about their positioning and potential value. Significant innovation across the productivity software space is increasing the noise around the 'digital workspace,' which, combined with legacy associations of traditional intranets, may make building mindshare for an intranet challenging over time. Redefining the intranet can be an uphill battle for those vendors that rely on the traditional sales approach of top-down buy-in – the real potential to see ROI in intranet features lies within employee engagement. Intranet vendors should aim to build legitimacy and mindshare via a sales approach that allows clients to start off with a robust trial offering.

In terms of intranet implementation, there is no standardized model. Additionally, each organization has expectations that they must keep in mind, along with constraints on how many individuals or department heads will have to manage the intranet's upkeep on an ongoing basis. The ownership of the intranet itself can be an internal struggle for end users, which is why we believe that vendors must offer substantial customer support during each phase of an intranet rollout. Furthermore, vendors must be explicit in providing strategies for a successful intranet because without a consistent plan of ownership and management, the intranet will fail in the long run.

There may be competitive pressure from digital workplace vendors that see the modern intranet as encroaching on their market. However, there are distinctive properties that digital workplaces have that modern intranets do not – specifically, accommodating niche work functions and addressing team- and individual-based workflow processes. Intranets and digital workplaces can work well together when leveraged for the appropriate functions. One way to view the connection between the two is that the core needs of an organization can begin to be met with an intranet (corporate transparency, company-wide data sharing, employee connections), but more granular areas of an organization's goals (specific team initiatives, employee tasks, smaller departmental sensitive data sharing) are better met by a digital workplace.

Chris Marsh
Research Director, Workforce Productivity and Collaboration

Chris sets the vision for and manages 451 Research's Workforce Productivity and Collaboration practice. His own research focuses on workforce productivity software including the project, team, task, content and innovation management applications into which businesses are putting more of their data and workflows; general worker productivity suites; technologies such as on-device workspaces, containers, partitions and endpoint management tools giving access to and providing security around productivity software; and the middleware technologies and workflow engines influencing how application experiences are designed and consumed.

Rosanna Jimenez
Associate Analyst

Rosanna is an Associate Analyst at 451 Research. Rosanna’s coverage focuses on workforce productivity and collaboration software such as digital workspaces, asset creation tools and workforce management applications. Prior to joining the analyst team, Rosanna worked with 451 Research sales supporting vendor and end-user research requests. 


Partick Daly
Analyst, Information Security

As an Analyst in 451 Research’s Information Security Channel, Patrick Daly covers emerging technologies in Internet of Things (IoT) security. His research focuses on different industrial disciplines of IoT security, including the protection of critical infrastructure, transportation and medical devices.

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