Sponsored by:
September 2016
smileguide 15
Building a modern intranet:
a communicator’s guide to collaborative platforms
Sponsored by:
www.igloosoftware.com
Building a
modern intranet:
a communicator’s guide
to collaborative platforms
It wasn’t too long ago that commentators
were predicting the demise of the
corporate intranet as the world became
obsessed with ESNs, stand alone apps
and now - the latest buzz - the digital
workplace. But in this smileguide we
explain why your intranet is one of the
must-have business tools and deserves
your attention now more than ever. We’ll
also help communicators make sense
of the bewildering developments in the
technologies that underpin the new
generation of intranets and help you feel
confident in having the right conversations
to ensure you end up with an intranet
you’ll love.
Report author:
Alison Boothby is a freelance
business writer specialising
in change, engagement and
topical workplace issues.
Did you know?
75% company intranets are on
SharePoint but more than 50% are
stalled, struggling or abandoned.
(Gartner 2014)
2
Food for thought
A modern intranet provides a
comfortable place for people to be
curious and innovative.
(Gartner 2014)
What do we mean by
a modern intranet?
Put simply, a modern intranet is a wellplanned and well thought-through digital
space that can transform the way people
get work done. It can certainly change the
way your employees communicate and
interact with one another, resulting in a
better informed and efficient workforce,
streamlined work flows and measureable
business value. When intranets work, they
have a tremendous impact on productivity,
innovation, employee engagement and
culture. “It’s no longer enough to have an
antiquated intranet no one uses or a place
to only share files internally. A modern
intranet has to connect people, information
and processes to meet the needs of a
modern workplace,” said Dan Latendre,
CEO, Igloo Software. “At Igloo, we want to
make the intranet experience as engaging
as possible, bringing together the key tools
and applications people use every day to
effectively connect and collaborate with
their colleagues.”
But before we look at how to approach a
modern intranet, it is worth a quick look at
where we came from...
Where did it all go right?
Our old dusty corporate intranets were
essentially internal ‘websites’ which allowed
a small number of users to publish ‘official’
content for the rest of the organisation to
consume. It was also somewhere where
all sorts of documents and information
were stored to be easily accessed from a
central place. Sounds like a good start.
But the problem was — or is, in some
cases - that traditional corporate intranets
were neglected and underused. Instead
of being the centre of our work life, many
of them became a dumping ground for
content where it was stored and ignored.
But there were several reasons for this
malaise: the search facility was generally
poor and information was too often outof-date; key operational programmes were
not accessible via the intranet; publishing
anything was a bit of a headache requiring
authorisation and action by a select few
resulting in frequent time delays. Dan
Latendre, CEO of Igloo told us: “Even if
your traditional intranet was generally good
at document management, it was poor
on social and poor on collaboration. The
intranet was somewhere you visited to find
something and then went somewhere else
to get on with your daily work.” So were
Enterprise Social Networks the answer?
Well, yes and no.
3
Food for thought
How great would it be to stop
hoarding files on your desktop
and have access to them all in one
place, complete with automatic
version control and the ability to
preview over 100 file types?
Where do ESNs fit in?
On the one hand, the combination of social
profiles, the ease of connecting people to
people to find experts across an organisation
and the ability to have conversations makes
them ideal for networking and helpful in
building a greater sense of community
beyond departments and geographical
locations. ESNs have undoubtedly created
enormous value in organisations, heralding a
more open and transparent way of working.
They have encouraged the sharing of
knowledge and know-how, given employees
a voice and democratised the workplace.
They’ve done things that the traditional
intranets could only dream of. In some cases
— Virgin Trains, for example — organisations
have replaced or are replacing their traditional
intranets with an ESN.
But, on the other hand, workers have realised
that they need to do more than merely
network with their colleagues. Being social is
great, but they need to be able to get the real
work done. They need technologies that help
them plan projects, collaborate and share
their work. They need a great storage system
that deals seamlessly with version control and
easy retrieval, they need access to corporate
updates — but not more email — and they
still need all the daily HR and operational
procedures to be pain-free.
ESNs generally don’t handle these elements
well without the help of other integrated
applications. In practice what we need are
intranets that combine the traditional content
and knowledge management features with
the newer social features that are part of
most people’s everyday lives: activity streams,
newsfeeds, great search facility, content
authoring and two-way communication. And
that’s not all.
4
What about apps?
Barely a week goes by without a new
collaboration app hitting the headlines and
it’s difficult to know whether to adopt them
or ignore them. There are some that are
genuinely creating waves such as Slack, for
example, which is transforming day to day
chat across organisations. Another notable
favourite is Trello for project management.
The reason certain apps are booming is
that they do a small part of what we need
to do in our daily working lives extremely
well and are better because they are more
focused than the tools available as part
of huge one-stop-shop platform solutions
like SharePoint and Office 365 which, while
technologically brilliant, are typically not so
popular with users.
Did you know?
By 2018, 67% of CEOs will have
digital transformation at the
centre of their strategy. (Gartner)
“A well-planned modern intranet connects
employees to the people, processes, and
information they need to do their jobs well.”
“Apps succeed when they take the
friction out of working” as Michel Ezran of
Lecko, the French digital transformation
research consultancy articulates: “Many
organisations are dealing with legacy
systems which creates problems. In many
cases they are clunky and not as efficient
for users as some of the newer apps and
the trend for using such apps is increasing.
The picture gets more complicated as
different apps are adopted for different
collaborative aspects of work. The issue
then is one of integration with core
business tools and information systems;
this is a big challenge for the industry.”
5
Did you know?
By using social technologies,
companies can raise the
productivity of workers by 20%
to 25% (McKinsey)
The makings of
a modern intranet
We asked Dan Latendre, CEO of Igloo,
what makes a modern intranet: “The
first thing to note is that it is not a
technology challenge,” he told us. “If
you’re starting with technology, you’re
starting in the wrong place. Your intranet
is where your employees start their day
so it must be in context to the work
that you do. You have to know what
the business really cares about — is it
productivity, innovation or competitive
advantage, for example? Whatever it
is, you need to create a framework for
success that will tackle the aspects of
your business where you want to see
measurable impact. Your intranet needs
to be fully integrated with everyday
workplace life to promote knowledge
sharing, collaboration and employee
engagement.”
If you are struggling to fine tune your
intranet wish list, Gartner has defined
the five most common uses for social
software — a modern intranet must tick
all these boxes:
Application gateway:
a single point of access to
everyday tools
Communications: a
platform to disseminate
news and announcements
Process management:
coordinating tasks and
activities
Knowledge management:
a way to capture, organise
and share knowledge
Collaboration: a central
location for working across
teams and projects, breaking
down silos and hierarchies
Dan Latendre summarises: “The
modern workplace is increasingly
disjointed, with experts spread across
multiple locations and offices — and
often all over the globe. This makes it
virtually impossible to know the amount
of information available, and where
it’s all kept. A well-planned modern
intranet connects employees to the
people, processes and information
they need to do their jobs well. When
employees have quick and easy access
to the information they need to do
their jobs efficiently and effectively, a
company becomes more productive,
innovative, and competitive.”
6
Key Intranet Drivers
Employee Engagement
News, wikis, blogs, communications
Business Processes
Environment
Work instructions, procedures,
processes, workflow
Process automation,
telecommuting, webinars,
less printing.
Knowledge
Management
Data & Applications
Document & content
management, search,
taxonomy, tagging
of content
Application directory,
intranet lists, front end
access to corporate
data (e.g. SAP, Oracle)
Change
Management
Collaboration
Alerts, news items,
page updates
New Ideas &
Improvements
Staff directory, discussion
forums, team rooms,
document and
content management
Discussion forums,
online suggestions
7
Easing the pain
In most organisations corporate
knowledge is trapped in the minds and
memories of employees, as well as being
stored in emails, attachments, shared
drives and desktops. Add to this some
of the biggest time wasters at work, and
you get the picture that things could
be much more efficient. These barriers
hamper productivity, cripple innovation
and decrease employee engagement.
Let’s consider the following four top
time wasters:
Email: A typical office worker spends 7
hours* — nearly a day a week — on email
reading, sifting and replying to messages.
Much of this time is spent reading
and replying to “reply all” messages,
untangling lengthy email threads,
locating attachments and chasing
people for responses.
Duplication of effort: It is estimated that
employees spend up to 2.5 hours* a
day duplicating or recreating work that
has already been done elsewhere in the
business, reinventing the wheel over and
over again.
Meetings
10
9
8
Time
7
(hours)
Email
6
5
4
3
Duplication
of effort:
Searching for
people and
information
2
1
0
Tasks
Searching for people and information:
With so much valuable data and
information hidden away in email boxes,
local filing systems, shared drives and in
people’s heads, employees spend 2.5
hours* a day just looking for things which
could be at their fingertips.
Meetings: Face to face meetings
are costly on time and too often
are unproductive. According to
effectivemeetings.com professional
workers attend an average of 62
meetings a month with between 30-50%
considered to be a waste of time.
“Modern intranet solutions are all
about breaking down these barriers to
productivity. They are about creating
connections between the right people,
processes and information that
employees need in order to do their jobs
effectively and efficiently.” stresses Dan
Latendre.
*IDC research
8
the good news is that intranet projects are
being driven increasingly by communications
teams and not IT departments
Top tip
*
Pick a vendor you trust and one
that will guide you through your
implementation and launch.
Three approaches to your modern intranet
There are several ways to solve the intranet
conundrum and in this guide we will
consider three broad approaches.
In all cases the underlying challenges to be
solved are the same:
*
to make your people want to share
their knowledge,
*
to improve collaboration and
*
enable a culture of communication that
gets work done more efficiently.
The current trend is to move away from
on-premises and choose cloud-based SaaS
intranet solutions over costly custom IT
projects. There’s no doubting that cloud
solutions easily meet the demands of an
increasingly mobile workforce and reduce
reliance on IT departments. However, data
security and control are the two biggest
barriers to adoption of cloud services,
along with the reliability of internet
performance. It is definitely not the end of
on-premises solutions. So while there are
pros and cons of both (see box) the good
news is that intranet projects are being
driven increasingly by communications
teams and not IT departments.
Michel Ezran again: “The software market
is pushing business customers towards
the cloud. There are some advantages to
using a set of online services hosted “by”
a publisher — up to a certain number of
users and for a few years, it will definitely
prove a more cost-effective model than
on-premises solutions and you will have a
clear picture of costs in the medium and
long term too. Needless to say, the cloud
offers many advantages, but it also locks
data into proprietary, closed environments.
Without being naive or giving away a
secret, this is down to a commercial
strategy that aims to lock customers in,
rather than any kind of technological
limitations. Publishers (without reducing
the debate to just Microsoft) have created
a model that requires almost no initial
investment from their customers and
offers competitive operating costs, but
comes with an indeterminate exit cost that
encourages customers to stay put.”
The good news is though, that some
of these publishers offer truly brilliant
intranet solutions!
9
Top tip
Know what apps and social tools
your people love to use and see
if you can integrate them.
Cloud vs On-premises
Cloud
Pros:
Cons:
*
Quick to deploy
Inexpensive to set up
Predictable IT spend
High quality and reliable technical support
Seamless updates & upgrades
Fully mobile
Highly scalable
Not IT reliant
Easy to use — little or no training
*
Less control over data and security
*
*
*
*
*
Less control over developments and upgrades
Limited customisation
Limitations on integration
Ongoing monthly subscription costs
Reliant on internet access
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
On-Premises
*
*
*
*
*
*
Total control and ownership of data
Total control over security
Fully customised solution
Easy integration with business tools
Not reliant on internet connection
Low ongoing costs
No monthly costs
*
*
*
High upfront costs
Significant IT involvement
Slow to deploy
*
Expensive and time consuming
to upgrade
Unpredictable IT spend
Limited mobile access
Normally requires training
*
*
*
*
10
1.
Top tip
Ensure adoption by choosing a userfriendly software that even your least
technical employees will want to
adopt.
Choose an intranet platform that
does everything you need it to do
Whether you opt for on-premises or cloud,
there are plenty of really good alternatives
to SharePoint despite it dominating the
market for the past two decades. With the
emergence of cloud-based technology,
on-premises solutions are becoming less
popular as they find it hard to compete with
the rapidly changing market and the move
to mobile. We have seen an increasing field
of cloud-based SaaS solutions that are quick
to deploy, need little or no IT intervention
and offer a great user experience. Igloo’s
intranet offering for example is described
by Kaya Ismail, Editor of CMS Critic as “...
speedy, sleek and feature-filled” and it is not
alone in its class. Others worth considering
are Communifire, Jostle, Interact.
11
Top tip
Customisation ability is key: your
collaborative workspace should look
just like your physical workplace
and include reminders to foster
culture and increase adoption.
Build on top of SharePoint or
Microsoft Office 365 and make
these powerful tools easy to use
75% of all corporate intranets are on
SharePoint, yet Gartner research in 2014
revealed that more than 50% of these
were stalled or struggling. Adoption
levels remain an issue although the
technology from Microsoft has the
potential to do everything — and a good
deal more than — you could possibly
wish for. Certainly much has been written
about how to improve adoption levels,
and there are many software companies
who have seen the opportunity to build
a great user experience on top of these
ERP solutions since the early 2000s.
Kevin Conroy of Blue Rooster and Rise
Foundation told us: “The good news
for our industry is that increasingly
communications professionals are
at the forefront of driving progress
with intranets. The iPhone has really
changed the whole landscape of user
experience and we think that employees
should expect a similar experience from
SharePoint. We harness the power and
benefits of SharePoint and Office 365 and
give employees an intranet they want to
use with a consumer style interface. As a
result, adoption levels soar.”
Similarly, Brightstarr offer their Unily
platform that draws on the power of
SharePoint, Yammer, Skype for Business,
One Drive, Delve and all the features that
come with Microsoft Office 365.
12
Case Study:
Amec Foster Wheeler employs
around 40,000 people in more than 55
countries providing consulting engineering
solutions mostly in the oil & gas, clean
energy, environment & infrastructure
and mining markets. When they merged
in November 2014, Tereza Urbankova,
Global Head of Internal Communications,
saw the opportunity to create a new digital
workplace. 18 months later she is well
on the way to realising that dream.
The challenge
Food for thought
Make the workplace fun with a social
newsfeed. It’s your virtual water
cooler for quick updates, funny
stories and ‘pats on the back’.
“Before the merger we recognised
we needed a platform to keep staff
informed about the progress of the deal,
and to counteract the rumour mill. The
Communications team partnered with IT
and created a simple platform that gave
us a central location to communicate
consistently. It featured regular updates
and FAQs about HR, IT, Project Delivery
and Health and Safety. We received
positive feedback — people were
telling us this was really useful even
when progress was quite slow.
“From the day of the merger this site,
although only a temporary solution,
became the gateway to all the legacy
intranets around the business, and
contained all the information people
needed about the new brand, the new
business, our vision and values, our new
operating model, project delivery and
other areas. We also added an interactive
feature where people could put their
comments and feedback.”
Meanwhile Tereza and her team were
working in the background in collaboration
with IT on a new intranet, built in
SharePoint 2016. But there was a snag: as
often happens with intranet development
the demands of the communicators
grow while the available resources of the
resident IT team shrink. The new intranet
was being built on premise and the IT
department soon realised it would have
to go on the cloud. While possible, it was
going to take them much longer to do
this than people were prepared to wait. IT
admitted they were stuck.
13
Build a great UX
on SharePoint
With 90% of the business online the new
intranet was seen as a vital strategic tool
and they needed to accelerate the content
migration from all the old intranets, so they
went out and looked for a product that could
work out-of-the-box. They found it in Unily the SharePoint product from Brightstarr.
Unily delivers a seamless intranet experience,
using SharePoint 2016, Office 365, Yammer
and Azure. “When I saw that platform I
thought this is great because it looked like
the proper first step on our journey toward
our digital workplace strategy. From the start
it would have elements that underpinned my
vision of what we call a platform for success.
May the 4th
They launched their new intranet called
Onespace on May 4th, using the Star Wars
theme: may the force be with you. It was
also their 4th intranet so they needed to do
something creative to get cut-through.
“Star Wars changed the film industry, and we
are changing the way we work. The theme
allowed us to put a different spin on the
launch, make it appealing and capture people’s
attention.
“When you are in the middle of the integration
of two businesses, you can imagine how much
is being thrown at people and you don’t want
them to get disheartened. We wanted them to
understand that despite our previous attempts,
this is the real thing.”
“Such a platform has to have everything our
people need to be successful whenever,
wherever and however they are working. The
previous intranet was a transition site; people The old and new intranets were run in
went through it to go somewhere else. We
parallel for a month so that people could
wanted them to stay and do everything in one get used to its new features.
place.”
So what are the features that herald the new
age of an intranet that truly supports Tereza’s
digital workplace vision?
“Firstly employees can personalise their apps
and tools. Then the general search is much
better as well as document search, searching a
type, date, owner, etc., which is quite cool.”
The people directory is a work in progress as
although all the information is clean and correct
it is consolidated on only basic data, i.e. names,
positions, locations contact details.
“We want people profiles to be much richer as
that is what people need when they search for
skills and expertise. That is the next step on our
agenda and we are separately running a project
focused entirely on people data.”
When it comes to governance of the intranet,
Tereza and her team have been working closely
with the various business units and functions to
ensure that they own the relevant pages and
that content is governed by those departments.
14
Yammer success
Another crucial feature of the new
Onespace is Yammer integration.
“We were struggling at the very
beginning, but Yammer has really taken
off in the past year. We have over 29,000
people on Yammer and the engagement
rate is around 12,000 people per month as
many people recognise its value as a tool
for collaboration. We have an on-going
campaign of use cases, showing how
Yammer has helped people in the past.
“But I think there are other reasons
for its success. When we became a
new company, people were hungry for
information and much of it was not yet
captured on the system, so many went on
Yammer to ask. The other factor may be
the challenging markets and customers
calling for more efficiencies. For example,
on Yammer we have a group called
More4Less where over 650 ideas have
been submitted and many have been
implemented. These factors have helped
drive adoption over and above our own
campaign.
on desktops then you are sunk. It has to
be mobile friendly, on work devices and
BYOD.
The intranet is mobile friendly; accessible
on work phones and personal devices
using BYOD through their work emails.
“It’s crucial; people do a lot of things on
phones nowadays and if you think about
an internal platform which only works
“We want to be seen as a company
modern in its approach to systems that are
up to date and indeed a company leading
the way in how we operate. Onespace, our
modern intranet, is an important part of
that.”
“We are lucky in this company as our
leadership team recognises the importance
of Onespace, our intranet, as a strategic
tool. It is not just a platform for news; it
helps people work more efficiently, helps
them collaborate.”
15
3.
Bring all your favourite apps and tools together,
accessible from a central command hub
For those that do not find everything they
need in a single platform solution, the
situation becomes trickier as Michel Ezran
of Lecko explains: “The operational reality
reveals that employees turn to pure play
vendors who perform better in specific
fields and are better equipped to respond
quickly to practical business needs, or to
tools with an approach that suits them
better.”
Working with a collection of standalone
apps may work well in the short term,
but before long the lack of integration
is likely to affect adoption levels as staff
waste time having to find the right tool or
the right app for the task at hand. With
so many apps and digital tools to choose
from, unless they are centrally managed
you risk losing the will of your staff who
will waste time trying to find the right tools
and documents that are designed to make
them more productive and efficient!
Michel Ezran offers a word of caution:
“The challenge lies in assessing the
potential to integrate these components
with one another and the potential to
integrate these components into the wider
business ecosystem. Users are likely to
come up against problems integrating
components with the information system
that are impossible to resolve with a
packaged SaaS product that does not
allow for any specific development.”
16
4.
It is this issue of bringing all the popular
apps and tools together and making them
accessible from a central command centre
that has led to some of the very latest
integration solutions. Take Workato’s
Workbot for Slack, for example. Slack has
revolutionised workforce communications and,
for an increasing number of organisations,
it is the go-to app at the start of the day.
How brilliant then to be able to access and
command other applications from within
Slack? And that’s exactly what Workbot
does. You can implement integrations for all
of your most used apps to Slack with one
single tool. Unlike the old, inefficient way of
constantly switching through applications
to access business information and execute
tasks, Workbot enables a single interface for
users to interact with over 150 top business
applications. For example, it includes outof-box commands for Salesforce, Zendesk,
Eventbrite, Trello, Box, Expensify, ServiceNow,
Intercom, QuickBooks Online, Jira, Github
and Mailchimp among others. Workbot
is the first chat bot on the market that
enables employees to access and command
applications from within chat shifting Slack
from a listening and chat platform to a doing
A successful intranet solution can help you
capture, organise, and share content quickly
and easily, leaving employees with more time
to do meaningful, productive work.
platform as it takes commands and executes
actions — it even understands the chat
context and makes recommendations.
(www.workato.com)
Where Workato’s Workbot has concentrated
its integrations on the back of the success of
a specific app (in this instance Slack), Mhub
(www.mhub.tv) delivers a completely new way
to work from a single, mobile hub accessible
from all desktop, laptop and mobile devices
that results in improved performance and
faster digital transformation. Michael Nagle
told us: “We are not a social platform, we are
a digital workplace app and we want to make
it really simple for businesses to change the
way they work.
“We believe that in most instances new
software is far too complicated for people
to get their heads around and needs to be
much simpler to use if organisations are to
genuinely change the way they get work done
and deliver more value from their technology
investments.” For a modest incremental
spend, Mhub gives you access to the critical
communications and the most valuable
features - only the bits you really need - from
all the other business apps and tools you use
on a day to day basis. “Changing the way a
business gets its work done is a combination
of culture and technology,” explains Michael
Nagle, “and by bringing together in one
central place only the critical features and
functions from the many powerful business
tools and apps you use daily helps win over
hearts and minds. By stripping it back and
keeping it simple we typically see adoption
rates soar to over 60%.”
Mhub is a great enabler of other technologies
too, helping organisations improve use of
and get better value from things like Yammer,
Salesforce, SharePoint, O365 and Jive that they
may have already invested in simply by pulling
in the latest updates into a single dynamic
Twitter-style newsfeed. Push notifications, the
ability to view on and offline together with quick
social feedback buttons and personally indexed
channels gives employees everything they
need to get on with their day.
17
Summary
So it seems, which ever route you
choose to go down — and there is no
right or wrong solution - your modern
social intranet must be flexible enough
to host a wide variety of business tools
and applications, whilst at the same
time be the go-to place for essential
communication, giving each employee
simple, easy access to all the tools they
need to get on with their work with
little or no fuss.
And with technology changing almost
daily, understanding what you are
really trying to achieve at the outset is
crucial. Without a clear vision of how
your workplace will behave differently
and how it will communicate with itself,
and without considering the impact
new technology will have on the way
work gets done, you are likely to fall
for the hype and spin around new
technologies and never achieve the
adoption levels you desire.
Top tips
Dan Latendre has some useful
advice to help you make the right
decision on your modern intranet:
“Investing in innovative software
always carries some risk but
there are ways to ensure that you
mitigate this risk:
*
Ensure adoption by choosing a
user-friendly software that even
your least technical employees
will want to adopt.
*
Know what apps and social
tools your people love to use
and see if you can integrate
them.
*
Customisation ability is key:
your collaborative workspace
should look just like your
physical workplace and include
reminders to foster culture and
increase adoption.
*
Pick a vendor you trust and one
who will guide you through
your implementation and
launch.
18
Igloo Software
www.igloosoftware.com
Igloo is a modern intranet, connecting people
with the information they need to do their best
work. Igloo helps fast-growing businesses and
large enterprises succeed by improving the way
people communicate and share knowledge.
With thousands of implementations under their
belts and customers in 80 countries Igloo can
help you build, launch, and manage an intranet
that enables meaningful conversations and
brings your company closer together.
With integrated file management, messaging,
collaboration and various business apps, Igloo
combines modern intranet capabilities with
best-of-breed cloud applications to become
the new corporate hub using their expertise in
culture, communications, collaboration, and
knowledge management.
Hosted in the cloud, the Igloo platform is fast
to deploy, easy to manage, and designed
using tools that people already know.
Put simply, Igloo is an intranet
you’ll actually like.
Launched in 2008, Igloo has appeared
in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the
last seven years and is on KMWorld’s
list of 100 Companies That Matter
in Knowledge Management.
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