Reinventing the Intranet for Better Employee Experiences

Modern businesses need modern ways of working. But, if we’re completely honest, when boiled down, the intranets of the past have become digital corners that employees consciously avoid. Largely because they are cluttered with irrelevant information streams that employees just don’t care about, or they act as a distraction from their focused areas of work. Of course, they’re great for organizing a party, voting on the next team event, or having a poll on the next ‘book of the month,’ but employees still have to rely on several tools, systems and information silos to achieve their primary goal – focused work.

Addressing workplace challenges

In an increasingly distributed workplace, how does an organization ensure that much-needed human connection, and foster a culture of growth by empowering its employees with continuous learning and knowledge? An intranet needs to do more than it's doing currently, it needs to connect the workplace by powering a new generation of intelligent content and communication experiences. It needs to provide a single source of accurate information and work with organizational silos without necessarily breaking them down. In short, we need to bring an external focus to our internal work environment as well. Modern interfaces should provide relevant contextual information, personalized to a user’s profile and needs in the moment.

If you’re looking to reinvent the intranet within your business, it should offer:

• Collaboration 
• Communication 
• Engagement
• Knowledge management
• Business insight

But remember – an intranet doesn’t have to be just an internal environment, it should be able to facilitate collaboration between partners, third-party agents and even customers. We at SDL call it an Enterprise Knowledge Hub, and it enables business insights as well as productivity.

Under the spotlight: a real-life example

Let’s look at one of the real-life examples of a customer who is on its journey to reinvent its audit platform for the future.

Big 4 Consulting Firm: Building Audit Platform of the Future

Where scalability meets compliance, DITA is often the best approach to structuring content.

Challenge: The consulting firm had faced the challenge of producing, updating, publishing, distributing and managing content in many languages, covering multiple jurisdictions, while integrating with authoritative content from varied sources. 80,000 auditors needed to collaborate with various people both in-house and external, but inefficiencies and fragmented silos were causing massive productivity losses.

Additionally, the firm serves divergent audiences including content producers and consumers, both internally and across its global client base. They needed a collective and intelligent approach to make their operations easy to manage, efficient and future-ready.

Goal: State-of-the-art enterprise knowledge hub, built with an integrated enterprise content technology to power contextual content experience at scale globally. SDL Tridion together with its partner network delivered:

• DITA (an XML data model for authoring and publishing intelligently)
• Multi-channel, multi-platform content management
• Enterprise content strategy
• User Experience R&D to architect and implement a global solution
• HAI (Linguistic AI) for content – to build a future-ready solution

 

Benefits of an Enterprise Knowledge Hub

• Helps create accurate business content once 
• Makes content findable every time
• Localizes anywhere on the fly
• Delivers contextual content across multiple channels
• Provides relevant content based on a user's profile
• Automates processes with artificial intelligence

First Steps towards building an Enterprise Knowledge Hub

• Accuracy: Compliant information
• Reuse: Modular content chunks usable several times 
• Formatless: Can be published and used on any channel, system or device 
• Tagged with metadata: Makes content findable, and machine readable

• It brings new content to your employees, partners & customers faster
• It accelerates content launches to all channels, advisors, and business partners
• It enables a personalized content experience for your employees and partners
• It eliminates unnecessary and redundant spend on multiple platforms and user experiences
• It drives down internal operating expenses associated with efficient workflow costs
• It drives down TCO through SaaS software and managed services