Intranets aren’t Dead

But, you need to have mobile components to your digital workplace…

Stuart Jackson, VP of Communications at Nissan Europe, shared a somewhat provocative idea on LinkedIn the other day claiming that the intranet was dead because a little over 10% of his target audience downloaded a new mobile app for corporate news delivery in the first four weeks. As several of others have pointed out in the comments, the use of a mobile app doesn’t mean the intranet is dead and intranets are about much more than news delivery.

Let’s take a look at both of those claims.

The Mobile Intranet

Workers are becoming more and more mobile as employers relax their restrictions and paranoia on where workers actually have to be to get their jobs done. Remote work has been gaining ground for years and compound that with the fact that most workers have smart phones in their pockets. It makes sense then that you have to account for some type of mobile presence for your intranet whether it is responsive design, full native applications, or hybrids. How much of your intranet lends itself to mobile design will vary across several factors but the biggest being what types of content your employees use it for. Which leads to the second claim…

The Intranet as Collaboration Platform

Jackson didn’t come out and state unequivocally that their new app was only for news delivery, but all indications point in that direction. He even called out the cafeteria menu ‘article’ as being always popular. Intranets are so much more than communication channels. Today’s intranets are both destinations and gateways. Destinations in that they need to have engaging content that employees seek out, such as news, employee directories, manuals, policies, benefits information, and other official sources of record. Gateways in that they can provide an easy method for employees to find the other applications and systems they need to conduct their work. Instead of having to remember or have bookmarked every web-based application, the intranet should provide as an centralized launching point that provides simplified access and login for employees.

Intranets are also becoming more social, incorporating many ‘web 2.0’ features such as blogs, forums, wikis, status updates, activity streams, and sharing, likes, and comments. Intranets that have gone far down that path may have evolved completely to enterprise social networks (ESNs). The ESN flips the traditional intranet model of top-down communication on it’s head and gives every employee a platform to have a voice and to interact with others and the company on their own terms.

How would I reach 1,000 people?

Jackson ended the piece asking a ‘simple’ question: if you were starting from scratch, how would you reach 1,000 geographically diverse people on day one — would you invest in an intranet or a mobile app?

It’s not really a simple question…too many details are unknown, such as what are you trying to reach them with, what other tools do they have, what tools do they need to do their jobs, what type of industry/profession is it, etc. The questions could go on and on.

If you really only wanted to send them corporate communications, then I think my answer would be email. Email goes wherever the inbox is be it the browser, desktop app, mobile client, etc. It’s also cheap and doesn’t require a lot of thought or energy to set up and get going.

The real answer, though, is that you should be able to design a mobile-ready, responsive intranet in 2016 that delivers to any form factor of browser.

The real question, however, is what do you want your intranet to be?

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