28 Dec
Why Intranets Fail: 5 Common Intranet Challenges To Overcome
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a shift to remote working for a majority of the workforce has put forth unique challenges, including difficulties in internal communication and accessing the required information and a drop in employees’ productivity and motivation levels. As such, companies must remain agile and adapt technologies that enhance remote employee workflows. Therefore, modern intranets are needed more than ever.
Traditional intranets have failed over time, owing to certain limitations and drawbacks that limit their scope. A study found 48% of organizations consider poor search functionality as a significant intranet challenge. While 37% and 22% of companies feel a siloed system of records and lack of integrations, respectively, are reasons why intranets fail.
As the workforce continues to operate from dispersed locations, modern intranets must overcome such obstacles to increase adoption and enhance communication, collaboration, employee satisfaction, and engagement.
Below, we present an insight into why intranets fail and the five most common intranet challenges to overcome.
Why do intranets fail?
Challenge #1: Lack of personalization
Employees are not interested in every piece of information related to the company. As such, an intranet will not appeal to the users unless the content provided isn’t customized according to their roles and responsibilities.
The unending pile of knowledge stored within the intranet is of no use if employees can’t access the right information at the right time, based on their activities, geography, role and team, interests, etc., especially in times of a crisis.
Therefore, the lack of personalization is one of the most significant reasons why intranets fail to secure higher adoption rates.
Challenge #2: Ineffective search functionality
The ability to “search” for information is one of the most vital features of an intranet. According to Mckinsey, employees spend 1.8 hours every day and approx 9.3 hours per week searching and gathering information.
As employees work from geographically dispersed locations, it gets even more critical for them to locate information quickly to ensure higher productivity. In such a situation, the traditional enterprise search that is merely based on keywords won’t suffice and is one of the significant reasons why intranets fail.
Therefore, an intranet must deliver smart search experiences with an enterprise search function that –
- Produces relevant search results based on user’s preferences, successful searches, and other user data collected
- Provides smart suggestions, filtering, geospatial search, and auto-complete feature
- Connects all external and internal apps and unifies organization-wide data to provide a wholesome search experience
- Transforms image and video data into searchable content
Challenge #3: Lack of information discoverability
Over 80% of enterprise content is unstructured in the form of memos, emails, images, videos, text documents, and much more. While the data holds immense value, traditional intranets cannot explore this data, uncover hidden insights, and find meaningful relationships to help make better decisions.
To increase adoption, modern intranets must be nourished with AI-powered knowledge mining tools that enable employees to access unstructured data seamlessly. Knowledge mining includes three phases –
- Ingest – bringing data together from first and third-party applications using pre-built connectors and integrations
- Enrich – data collected in phase one is analyzed, enriched with the right metadata, and classified with the right tags
- Explore – cognitive enterprise search engines replace traditional search engines and connect all internal and external apps to provide access to enterprise-wide content. These search engines deliver contextual and personalized results based on the users’ profiles.
Challenge #4: Broadcasting targeted messages
Traditional intranets usually cannot be used to send targeted information and news to specific groups of employees. This capability becomes supercritical when your workforce works remotely and you need to constantly send personalized communications to different audiences.
Modern intranets have powerful content targeting features that can be used to target messages to different groups. Broadcasters can filter audiences based on their roles, responsibilities, locations, seniority, languages, etc. and send targeted communications.
Challenge #5: Intranet is siloed from other digital workplace tools
A traditional intranet served as a simple internal go-to webpage for news, policies, corporate documents, and the employee phone book. Consequently, employees were required to switch between apps to find information and perform day-to-day tasks.
However, modern intranets manifest as a collection of collaboration tools, an internal communications platform, a content management system, a knowledge-sharing space, and even a virtual water-cooler.
Thus, a modern intranet can act as a unified digital workspace, in which employees can collaborate, communicate, access information, brainstorm ideas, and get work done. They eliminate siloes by providing integrations with legacy business apps and organization-wide tools.
Get Started
As highlighted above, companies must deploy modern intranets to overcome the various limitations of traditional intranets and build a scalable, future-proof digital workspace that addresses the different needs of employees.
At Acuvate, we help our clients build and deploy a robust SharePoint intranet with Mesh 3.0, our Employee Experience Platform. Mesh uses technologies like artificial intelligence, natural-language processing, and machine learning to deliver personalized content recommendations, improve knowledge discovery, and extend the intranet reach by providing seamless integrations with various LoB systems.
Some of the exciting capabilities of Mesh include –
- Azure cognitive enterprise search
- AI-driven content personalizers
- Knowledge mining
- Expertise finder
- Multilingual capabilities
- Internal communication tools
- Collaboration tools
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer service transformation experts for a personalized consultation.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Poonam Chug