This definitely defines the intranet of old which was a place where documents, thought important to staff, were uploaded. It was really about one-way communication more than anything. The days of the document storage type intranet are over. It’s critical for organisations to have interactive, collaborative and engaging intranets. Here are my top five reasons;

Designed by Freepik http://www.freepik.com 

1.     Develop a collaborative culture. It’s tough for an organisation to call itself collaborative without the tools to support the concept. Innovation is happening all the time and often that innovation or creative thinking is lost because it’s not shared between divisions. A collaborative culture has so many benefits to an organisation but at the very lowest level, this may mean crowd solving of key problems, team members supporting each other in ways that go beyond ‘teamwork’ requirements and more.

2.     Learn from your people. People within organisations are already engaging on a myriad of social tools and all the learning that results is lost to you. For organisations that understand the value of an ‘ear to the ground’, providing social-type tools for an intranet is not an unacceptable concept. 

3.     Flatten out the structure. Flatter structures have proved to be more productive and happier structures and an interactive intranet can further contribute to this.

4.     Give your people more identity. Profile based platforms means that people can engage defined by who they are, rather than the organisational role they play.

5.     Organisations today all have some form of digital strategy and many are using that strategy to become leaders in their field. A collaborative intranet only further enhances this making organisations digital from the inside.

Keep reading over the next couple of weeks for more information and trends on collaboration within organisations.

Janice Scheckter, MD of Indigo New Media, guides organisations on internal collaboration and intranets that work!