During a webinar last week, we explored how companies have been able to overcome knowledge-access and intranet-adoption challenges by embracing a search-driven “Intranet of Everywhere.” Intranets have seen much evolution in the 20+ years they’ve been around, but one of their core objectives from the start—to connect workers with the knowledge they need, when and how they need it—is rarely achieved even today. Poor knowledge access and “abandoned” intranets are the result.
That’s because traditional intranets do not appreciate the truly dynamic nature of modern work, and the sheer volume, velocity, and variety of knowledge and expertise this new type of work creates. Mobilized, socially networked, and “always on” workers are collaborating and sharing knowledge across a diverse and ever-evolving mix of productivity, messaging, and collaboration tools. Corporate intranets that do not synthesize and analyze these diverse knowledge streams in real-time and enable secure, efficient, and intuitive access to this knowledge will simply not succeed.
New research from IDC highlights the struggles of the conventional approach, finding that knowledge workers are only able to access the information necessary to do their job 56% of the time, despite spending 36% of their time searching for and consolidating information. It’s a productivity loss with big financial consequences: The same IDC report estimates that an organization with 1,000 knowledge workers will lose approximately $5.7 million per year due to poor knowledge-access.
Key Capabilities of any Intranet of Everywhere
During the webinar we explored how a search-driven Intranet of Everywhere has helped leading organizations across industries meet their knowledge-access goals, and reviewed the key capabilities every successful Intranet of Everywhere delivers:
- Consolidates content from all knowledge streams in real-time
- Automatically identifies the “Who, What, When, Where, and Why” of the content
- Enriches the content with structure for findability & mashability
- Automatically identifies experts based upon actual work product
- Recommends predictive knowledge to workers based upon the task at hand
- Enables crowd-sourced knowledge curation in the course of work
- Delivers actionable analytics to optimize use of knowledge
- Is available within the platforms & screens workers use
Back in 1996, a BusinessWeek article voiced well the broader vision for corporate intranets: To “pull all the computers, software, and databases that dot the corporate landscape into a single system that enables employees [to] find information wherever it resides,“ It was a lofty goal…and fortunately a search-driven Intranet of Everywhere finally makes this goal achievable.
Want to learn how? Listen to a recorded version of our webinar and download our Intranet of Everywhere solution brief.