Filed under: Intranets
Intranets are increasingly being owned and managed by communications teams or business areas. In general, this is a positive shift, leading to greater alignment with staff and organisational priorities.
However, the move away from IT ownership, can leave intranet teams with a significant knowledge and skills gap relating to technology. In this technology-dominated world, is this viable or sustainable? Can intranet teams do without technical knowledge?
Intranets as a technology platform
There has always been a technology component to the delivery and management of intranets. When intranets were just a publishing platform for content and news, modern web content management systems (CMS) thankfully took away much of the technical complexity, replacing it with simple point-and-click interfaces.
Many technical aspects remained, however, often relating to integration with other business systems. Notable examples include HR self-service, the staff directory, online forms, and business process integration.
With changes in the broader web landscape, expectations of intranets are growing rapidly. No longer just publishing tools, modern intranets are expected to support collaboration and social tools. There is also a desire to deliver simple, streamlined tasks online, hiding behind-the-scenes complexities.
These greater capabilities all require technology involvement. Even when capabilities are mostly deployed ‘out-of-the-box’, work needs to be done to seamlessly integrate features together to create a coherent intranet.
(August article by James Robertson, read the full article)