Isn’t it Time You Modernized Your Intranet?
16 Jun 2020
8 min read
Let’s be honest: the traditional corporate intranet needs modernizing. It has become a place that employees avoid using, and when they do use it, they’re not finding the information they want. It’s not surprising then that employees are least satisfied with their intranet, compared with a long list of business tools and applications they use on a daily basis at work, according to Forrester Research.
The market research firm has just published The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2020 report, the first time the company has analyzed and evaluated the most significant intranet vendors on the market. The companies included are re-defining the future of the intranet, and SDL Tridion is delighted to be included. We spoke to Arpita Maity, Senior Product Manager at SDL, about why brands are looking to re-invent their employee experiences, their main challenges, and what makes SDL stand out in a competitive landscape.
Why are brands looking to modernize their intranet?
If you think back to the mid-90s when the first intranets were deployed in corporate environments, they offered single page portals with links to information and resources across the business. Search was limited. Communication difficult. And collaborating on content was almost impossible. Fast forward 25 years later, and have things really changed that much? How often have you managed to find exactly what you’re looking for on your intranet, and more importantly, been able to use it? Do you regularly communicate with colleagues and collaborate through your intranet? I suspect not.
In today’s increasingly distributed workplace, employees need instant access to the right information, and collaborative tools to keep them productive. Companies are finally recognizing the benefits of cultivating a culture of growth by empowering employees with instant access to knowledge – and an intranet forms the backbone of that strategy.
What are the challenges businesses face when building a new intranet?
The trouble is that content management systems have grown into behemoths. Businesses store an incredible amount of information, and their intranet strategies simply haven’t kept up. They rely too heavily on aging on-premise or home-grown intranets, adopting a one-size-fits all strategy without taking into account that different employees consume information in very different ways. They also lack information governance and policies, leading to a lack of content management. All this means that employees end up spending far too much time searching for but not finding the right information – wasting $5.7 million annually for large organizations, according to IDC. It’s a mess, and one that companies know they need to fix. The trouble is they don’t know where to start.
What makes Tridion stand out?
SDL Tridion is the industry’s leading content management system, which makes us particularly well suited to complex content environments. In The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms report, SDL Tridion was noted for its “customizable framework, strong information architecture and ability to help customers accelerate their pace of innovation.”
Our approach is very different from other intranet vendors, who either typically support publishing a combination of web content or documents on an intranet, or focus heavily on employee communication (such as town-halls, company news or HR-related activities). With our solution, we’re able to cater for both ‘regular’ intranet content as well as highly structured information – including policies, procedures, guidelines and other business critical information – that requires strict due diligence, version control and approval processes in a more granular manner. Both regular and structured content can be published through a portal-style intranet using our content-mashup capabilities. This means we’re able to deliver contextually-relevant content, across multiple channels, based on a user’s profile and role within the business.
We also understand that security and content compliance and accuracy are very important for enterprises. We take a holistic approach to information governance, managing corporate information by implementing processes, roles, controls and metrics that treat information as a business-critical asset.
And to top it all, our translation capabilities are world-leading, so employees can access any type of information, in their own language. Either translated on-the-fly through our market-leading neural machine translation, or by connecting to our translation management solution. These capabilities elevate your organization to new heights of digital readiness.
What kind of businesses benefit from SDL Tridion?
Our customers are typically large global enterprises with $1B+ in revenue. They have large volumes of information scattered across the business, in different formats, and have no clear single view across complex lines of business. They often include several internal (and external) teams and stakeholders that need to work together, but lack streamlined workflows to facilitate error-free collaboration.
Any company that places value on the quality of its information benefits from SDL Tridion. These often include companies that have a large product portfolio that requires detailed documentation. We also deliver on the promise of developing well-equipped employees that have access to the right knowledge, improving customer lifetime value by providing superior information at any stage in the customer life cycle: business critical content such as policies, procedures, in-depth documentation and other crucial information that employees or customers may need at some point in time – all the way to after sales support and more.
Can you give us any customer examples?
One of our customers include one of the big four accounting firms.
Around 80,000 of their auditors needed to collaborate with people both in-house and externally, but inefficiencies and fragmented silos were causing massive productivity losses. Additionally, the firm serves a wide variety of 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.
Together with our partners, we built a solution to facilitate an integrated intranet and knowledge management platform that provides a digital experience to all stakeholders that is relevant, contextual and, above all, efficient and easy to manage. The combination of DITA standards, metadata and underlying taxonomies, allowed contextual personalization and a far more relevant employee experience – resulting in empowerment and better productivity.
We solved their business challenges of producing, updating, publishing, distributing and managing content in many languages, covering multiple jurisdictions.
What does the future hold for SDL Tridion?
We are focused on building more intelligence into the business processes themselves. Organizations need to have solutions that create intelligent content – content that understands its context, so it can fluidly deliver itself to where it is needed, and not be tied to its rigid format. Furthermore, we are evolving our Artificial Intelligence (AI). What we already have is the power of machines to help us do mundane and routine tasks, such auto classify information with tagging, generate summaries of articles and so on. It’s very exciting times ahead as we bring together the best in content and language, in an intelligent way that transforms the pace of innovation for our customers through true knowledge management.
Click here to download your copy of The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms report!
Denis Davies
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