Introduction to Social Intranet: What to expect from it, how to use it and how to implement it

How to use a social intranet to your advantage

From a strategic perspective, a social intranet can add a lot of value to the organization. Here are the main characteristics of a social intranet and how you can use them to your advantage.

It facilitates collaboration and project management

Social intranet offers a lot of functionality meant for boosting collaboration and project management. With the click of a button, members of a project team can ask each other quick questions and receive the answers just as quickly. They can even make the question public, so employees outside the project team can also see it and chime in.

Projects will still need a traditional structure to make sure all requirements are met, but the collaboration facilities of a social intranet will take the process to another level and make it more efficient. Multiple points can be discussed at any given point and knowledge about various topics can be shared simultaneously, making the project meet its goals in a more streamlined way.

It boosts knowledge sharing

When collaborating in a traditional way, a significant amount of knowledge gets lost or only exists in the heads or email addresses of certain individuals. With a social intranet, it becomes much easier to share knowledge among a great number of people. Everyone in the organization who is interested in a subject will be able to learn from existing knowledge about it. All it takes is a quick search query to see if information is available on the social intranet. This way, knowledge can be reused and even updated repeatedly.

Similarly, people will have access to a greater knowledge pool when asking questions. Instead of asking a question to an individual in real life or over the phone, you could ask it on the social intranet. You can still select individuals who will get a notification about your question, but everyone else who reads the question can contribute as well. This could lead to answers from an unexpected angle or to discovery of a related subject that you might have otherwise only encountered further down the line, or not at all.

Not only does this increase efficiency and productivity of employees and project teams, but also the transparency of the organization as a whole.

It saves time

A social intranet has the potential to save great amounts of time. Employees can get answers to their questions more quickly, enabling them to resume working more quickly. Whereas otherwise, they would have to wait until the next project meeting or contact moment with their manager. In the long run this will help projects run more smoothly and efficiently and ultimately, help deliver results faster.

Another time saver is the way an internal help desk or IT support communicates with the organization. The following scenario might sound familiar to you: there is an issue and everyone starts calling the IT department at the same time. The result is that the IT department spends all their time answering calls instead of resolving the problem. With a social intranet, a quick notification could be sent, informing everyone that they are aware of the problem and working on it.

It reduces costs

A social intranet provides a virtual collaboration environment that takes away the need for employees to travel from location to location and meet each other in person. It combines the uses of phone, email, instant messaging and even video calls into one platform. In many cases, the reduced travel costs alone are worth considering the investment.

Furthermore, all the company knowledge will be easily stored and rediscovered inside the platform. This gives the opportunity to save on physical file storage expenses. It also makes the process of IT audits by external parties a lot easier and faster, reducing the costs that come with them.

It increases safety of sensitive data

By giving people the opportunity to share all their work-related data with each other through a social intranet, it reduces the risk of them using their own solutions or third party solutions to achieve these goals. Too many times have I encountered organizations where employees found their own way of collaborating by using USB sticks or cloud-based solutions like Dropbox.

Because the IT department cannot control these solutions and applications, and in many cases, is not even aware of them, there is a high risk of sensitive data landing in the wrong hands. If the organization provides an intuitive, user friendly social intranet that meets the needs of the employees, they are much less likely to start looking for their own ways of working.

How to implement a social intranet

Implementing a social intranet not only goes hand in hand with expectation management, but also requires an implementation strategy. This strategy will be different for every organization, depending on their specific circumstances, existing IT infrastructure and unique needs. However, there are some general pointers to consider before starting the implementation.

First of all, does your IT staff know how to implement it, maintain it and manage it? Or do you need help from third party consultants and specialists? In most cases, this is going to be a combination of both, especially in large organizations with many end users. You will need at least a basic understanding of the cloud and how to work with it.

Furthermore, the social intranet should be in accordance with existing Information Governance policies. It should be very clear which information should be migrated to the intranet and which IG-related challenges need to be overcome. Also, since the employees will now have the ability to contribute and publish content, there should be guidelines for how to use the social intranet and what types of content are allowed and not allowed.

There are various options on the market for a social intranet, from highly customizable, specific solutions to ready-to-go solutions. For many organizations, a ready-to-go SharePoint Intranet will already provide a solution for most of the basic needs. Furthermore, its deployment is easy and fast and it focuses heavily on user friendliness.

Apart from defining what you want you want to achieve with the social intranet and overcoming possible technical obstacles, one of the most important factors in any implementation is user adoption. This process continues well beyond the actual implementation. You want users to start using the social intranet, but more importantly, they should keep using it in the long run.

It’s human nature to be skeptical about change. A social intranet will change certain workflows and work processes, so it’s very important to manage this change and create a high level of user adoption.

One of the best proven ways to achieve user adoption and engagement is to clearly define and communicate what the new social intranet is all about. What is the business goal of the intranet and how will it help users become more productive? How will it help them complete their daily tasks more efficiently and what extra value does it add compared to “the old way” of working? In some cases, it will be beneficial to concentrate heavily on social features and content sharing. In other cases, focusing on knowledge sharing and collaboration might be the best way to go. This depends on the specific needs of your organization and your end users.

Listen to the feedback you get from your end users. Give them training, organize workshops and explain what the social intranet is capable of. Ultimately, the implementation of a social intranet can only be called a success if the end users are on board and engage with the system. I recommend reading this article for more tips on this topic.

Conclusion

A social intranet has great benefits for most every organization. While improving collaboration, efficiency, productivity and knowledge sharing, it reduces company costs and risks. Provided that an adequate user adoption strategy is in place, this virtual collaboration platform could improve the efficiency of your entire organization. Feel free to enquire about the possibilities for your specific organization.

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