Driving User Adoption with Social Intranets
The first wave of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) investments has been in the realm of tighter control of records and documents, and the management of the content lifecycle process. This layer of the ECM platform is commonly referred to as “Systems of Record”. However the broad adoption of these systems by users has been lacking.
Businesses are looking longingly at the successful user adoption of consumer social media, and intranet owners inside businesses grapple with two interrelated challenges: How do I drive user adoption? And how do I drive employee engagement with my systems of record?
This has given rise to a new layer of ECM solutions, called “Systems of Engagement”. Systems of engagement place people at their centre, as opposed to systems of record which place the content and documents at the centre. Corporate intranet and employee portal designs are following this shift to be more people-focused, forming the core of this new digital workplace. Intranets are evolving into the space where traditional managed content and applications merge together with social and collaborative content streams, delivered to any device.
This is a major evolutionary leap for corporate intranets. And taking this leap is made more challenging in an environment where there is stiff competition for budget and internal resources to execute on intranet projects.
Intervate, a leading provider of ECM solutions on the Microsoft SharePoint platform, is assisting multinationals and corporates in South Africa to navigate this shift to social business on their ECM platforms and intranet portals.
“We meet customers where they are at in their evolution to social business. There is no ‘one size fits all’ technology solution to throw at the problem, because putting down the engagement layer of the ECM platform is fundamentally about people – and more specifically, the people operating within the unique culture of each customer,” says Roy Hobson, Business Development Executive at Intervate.
“For the many companies that have invested in Microsoft SharePoint as the core of their platform, there are three different possibilities that we recommend: as a first step the native collaboration features within SharePoint 2010, which are greatly enhanced in SharePoint 2013; secondly, the cloud-based social platform offered by Yammer, which is loosely coupled with SharePoint; and for those organisations willing to make the biggest evolutionary shift, we deploy the Newsgator Social Sites platform, in which the user engagement mechanisms are tightly interwoven with the ‘system of record‘ features of the underlying SharePoint platform” continues Hobson.
Intervate’s is renowned for its bespoke solutions for clients. And their approach to corporate intranet solutions is no different. Intervate take the time to understand the multi-layered issues experienced by clients and it’s from there that purpose-crafted and integrated solutions are built
For further information and insight on Intervate’s full range of products and solutions please visit www.intervate.com
