Secrets of the Best Intranets

Farrah Hunt:

During this presentation you can use the hashtag Backstage Pass. After the presentation, we'll take questions from attendees. To ask a question, please use the toolbox on the right side of your screen. And due to the size of attendance, attendees will be in listen mode only today to cut down on background noises. There will be a short survey at the conclusion of the webinar, and we would really appreciate your feedback. I'd like to welcome our Reason One presenters today, Ben Cash, Chief Executive Officer and Lauren Minors, Marketing Manager. I'll now turn over to Lauren to begin this afternoon's presentation.

Lauren Minors:

Welcome, before we get started, we'd like to take your pulse and learn a little bit about you. In the poll window, please choose your main role for your organization. Marketing, communications, IT, HR, something else. We didn't have room for Chief Cat Herder. But if you could just take a minute and identify your role in your organization. Cool. All right. Looks lots of communications folks and marketing. Great.

Lauren Minors:

So, it looks we have mostly communications folks, some marketing folks, some IT folks and some other joiners. Great. Well we're going to be touching on topics that are going to be relevant to all of you. Regardless of your role, you're all here to find out how to improve your intranets, which means you probably have some ideas about your own. So take a second and share in the chat one thing that you find frustrating about your intranet. It can be just a few words, but just one thing. And just drop it in the chat. (silence)

Ben Cash:

Don't be shy.

Lauren Minors:

Don't be shy.

Ben Cash:

And we're just going to let that roll while we get going here, so, feel free to type those in as we're talking. We really want to hear from you and they also will help us at the end of the... Into the Q and A session to figure out what topics we want to talk about.

Ben Cash:

So, well, thanks for joining the webinar, on one of the most... The biggest, sexiest, most trending topics in the world right now, intranets, said no one ever, right? But for us it is. And the story of how that came to be is where we want to start today.

Ben Cash:

As Farrah mentioned, I'm Ben Cash CEO of Reason One, and my cohort is Lauren Minors, our Marketing Manager. And we've worked on quite a few intranets over the years, not a new thing for us. But what was the first was working with Prisma Health to build an intranet, during a merger, during a pandemic.

Ben Cash:

Intranets are challenging on their own, but bringing together two healthcare systems, two teams of over 30,000 staff, two different cultures, two sets of stakeholders to legacy intranet, it was a serious hill to climb. Add to that, a pandemic where teams are learning to work remotely dealing with unprecedented HR challenges.

Ben Cash:

There's that unprecedented word again. Burnout, turnover, you name it. That hill turned into a mountain and the intranet went from being ancillary to mission critical. So we're happy to say that we made it to the top and it was a success. And we'll share a few insights from the project throughout the webinar today.

Ben Cash:

But the biggest result for us as an agency was it really made us curious about intranets. Curious about this often overlooked underfunded, competitive stepchild of tools, curious about why it can be so hard for so many organizations to be successful and curious of the real impact it can have in an organization when done right.

Ben Cash:

As an agency whose mandate is to help those who do good, do better, we know that better functioning healthcare organizations means better care and ultimately healthier communities. Something that literally hit home for each and every one of us over the past year. So we've reached out to our friends at Greystone. Thanks Farrah, thanks Mike, who also happened to be curious and embarked on a comprehensive industry survey to understand the secrets behind the best healthcare intranet.

Lauren Minors:

What we don't need to tell you is that the data showed that people find their intranets ineffective yet critical to their jobs. With more of us working remotely, even beyond the pandemic, this is a major problem. But we do need you to know you're not alone. You're not the only ones having these challenges.

Lauren Minors:

And what you need to know, and why you're here today is why intranets are either effective or ineffective and what you can do about it. And it's pretty simple. The most successful intranets are led by MarComm, have budget, have a buy-in, a plan, and utilize experience-based technology. These are the most successful intranets. The ones that do not have those things are significantly less successful.

Ben Cash:

All right, Lauren, I think you pretty much covered it there. That's a wrap. Thanks for attending our webinar today to just get those notes down, I think you'll be able to solve that. Of course I'm over-simplifying a bit. And there's definitely some exceptions. You don't have to have all those things to be successful, but in a nutshell, it's what we see when we boil it down.

Ben Cash:

When dealing with big projects and complex challenges, it's not uncommon for us to get lost in the forest with buy-in and budgets and technology decisions, lack of resources, or who controls, what. Kind of sucks, right? So the reason we call ourselves Reason One, is because we help this driven organizations channel and lead with their why.

Ben Cash:

The one thing that gets you up every day and makes it worth it. In the case of an intranet, that one reason is your users. And by users, I mean humans that make health organizations function and thrive. Staff, administrators, doctors, nurses, specialists, cooks, janitors, everybody. When you put your people first, it shows.

Lauren Minors:

So, what is the secret anyway? Engagement strategy. Putting people first begins with having a strategic understanding of your audience and then building the intranet around their needs. And the simplest way to start is to have a plan. A plan will ensure that all parties – MarComm, IT, HR, leadership and all the other stakeholders – are unified in that pursuit of their goal.

Lauren Minors:

43% of intranets rated effective had a written plan, whereas only 24% did when IT played a role. Why is that? We believe it's because engagement strategy is at the heart of what marketing and communications does. Simply put, their job is to understand align, connect with and engage audiences.

Lauren Minors:

But let me be really clear. This is not knocking the valuable work and perspective that IT brings to the table. Your mission-critical to the success of any healthcare organization. What the survey data revealed though, was that the role of IT in intranet projects specifically can affect outcomes and creating great intranets is more than technology procurement.

Lauren Minors:

So what does engagement strategy mean? For us, it means three things. First, stakeholder and leadership engagement. This means getting buy-in and clarity on what we're building and why. Defining what success looks and building a plan for feedback, approvals, and more down the road.

Lauren Minors:

It's user engagement, engaging your users from the outset through launch and beyond. This is user research, user experience, user testing, even building stakeholder groups within your organization. We also need continuous feedback involving the people that it's built for will absolutely ensure its success.

Lauren Minors:

And finally, it's tech built for engagement. Your platform needs to support the goals that you've identified as being critical to your users. Some platforms are better suited to engagement than others. So aligning your goals as you're making those choices is a great litmus test for how well your intranet will serve your audience.

Lauren Minors:

And it doesn't stop there. Whether you're already doing these things or you're planning on starting soon that sustained maintenance management, continuous improvement are all key to keeping your intranet fresh and engaging. And a true digital home for your team that supports all of their career activities.

Ben Cash:

So, I know it's really, really hard to believe that intranets have a value perception problem. We're picking up on that sarcasm there. 63% of respondents said their leadership to varying degrees, didn't see their intranets as worthy of investment. Not surprisingly highly effective intranet showed that when they had the highest executive buy-in.

Ben Cash:

So how do we get them to care? What keeps them up at night? As a CEO, myself, I think a lot about morale, turnover and retention, culture inclusion, not to mention operational efficiency. That's only gotten more intense for me during the pandemic, especially with remote work.

Ben Cash:

I've seen firsthand the data and the difference the right digital tools can have on an organization success. So how do we get use leadership connect the dots too. And here are three next steps you can take. Number one, show them the data. They're busy and they don't often have visibility.

Ben Cash:

It's important to gather the data from tools Google Analytics and use it to show leadership, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Yeah, that familiar SWOT analysis, associated with their teams, intranet. Even better, taking the internal survey to share real human feedback with leadership as to what's working and what's not.

Ben Cash:

Number two, give them budget context. What are the healthcare organizations spending? I find that I'm often swayed when I learned what other companies like mine are doing. It normalizes my thinking, and challenges my assumptions. In the case of the survey, budgets range, anywhere from less than $10,000 to $500,000 and even beyond.

Ben Cash:

Not surprisingly, that also coincided with the size of the organization. A simple takeaway for leadership is that the most effective intranets, regardless of organization has annual budgets greater than a hundred thousand dollars. It's a great place to start.

Ben Cash:

Number three, make it clear that successful intranets need stewardship. I don't know about you, but when it's your... For me, you've experienced, if you want to ensure to failure of a project understaff it. While academic medical centers and medium-sized health systems indicate the most robust intranet staffing with some between 10 to 25 full-time employees, more than a third in fact, I think around 37% of organizations, said they only have two or less, some with none. That's just unacceptable and it actually bears it in the data.

Ben Cash:

There were zero top performing intranets without dedicated resources. And those with two to five or more had a majority share of the top performing group. Not to say that you have to have five dedicated resources or even 10, but it should give you a clear case of leadership that success doesn't happen on its own.

Ben Cash:

And I want to just do a little quick crowdsourcing here, open your chat up again. If you're one of the lucky few, or maybe the majority that where leadership actually has buy-in and you've gotten your support. What is the one thing you wouldn't recommend to your peers to help achieve it? Just throw that in the chat box, I'd love to hear what you all think. What you've done.

Lauren Minors:

And we'll give folks a minute to think about that and share strategies with their peers. But before we dive into the next section, let's take a minute. Think of a moment in the last few days or weeks when you had a really great interaction with a website or an app. What made it great?

Lauren Minors:

Did you feel connected to other people, or did you feel you were part of a community? Did it make a daunting task really, really easy or something that you were dreading not so bad. Now, I want you to imagine that your intranet is like that every day. Of respondents that ranked their intranet's extremely effective, very effective and effective, 82% said the intranet actually made their jobs easier.

Lauren Minors:

Made their jobs easier. For the rest of them, a majority said the opposite that it made their jobs more difficult. So how do we get to that place, where our intranets are a welcomed pleasure rather than the bane of our existence? Where you're going in to check your intranet every day, not because you have to, to complete a task, but because you want to, because that's where you engage with your peers.

Lauren Minors:

The first step to successful user experience is to fully understand who you're building it for. For example, we did some not-so-live user testing at Prisma, dummy proofing their user experience. In all seriousness, conducting interviews and user surveys to understand the needs and motivations of your internal audiences is super critical to focusing your priorities.

Lauren Minors:

This is extremely common for external sites, we all do this. And it's a practice that we really need to be applying internally as well. One great tool is Greystone's gSight intranet survey tool that allows hospitals to collect user feedback about your intranet. And also allows you to compare your intranet perception, experience and utilization with your peers. Super valuable, right?

Lauren Minors:

From the survey we learned the important role that user testing plays in successful intranet. 63% of respondents who said their intranet was effective. Did user testing prior to launch. Compared with 26% who didn't. And interestingly, when IT played a lead role, only 38% of organizations employed user testing.

Lauren Minors:

So what do you do about that? Again, conduct a survey using Greystone's tool or any other starter that you might have. Also, create a staff stakeholder group for user testing that engages different departments and demographics and schedule testing at key milestones in your projects to get that good rich feedback.

Lauren Minors:

If your staff is too busy, no problem. Use a third party user testing service usertesting.com. These are pretty inexpensive and fairly efficient. The insight though that these tactics will illicit will be extremely valuable to your efforts. Sure. But they hold an intrinsic value as well.

Lauren Minors:

Along with your analytics, this information can help you make your case to leadership. Beyond that, when you engage your actual users in building this tool, that is ultimately for them, you're creating a team of early adopters, advocates and maybe even some fans that are going to support and ease your rollout efforts.

Ben Cash:

All right. So, let's talk about putting users first. Great UX is equal parts, inspiration and facilitation. Inspiration UX, especially intranets, is about creating a sense of belonging and shared purpose. How does your brand messaging and content reinforce our culture and mission and bring people together?

Ben Cash:

Intranets deserve good design. They deserve content strategy. They deserve an engagement strategy. They deserve the same time and energy we put into making public sites engaging and inspiring. Inspiration should be leadership's goal and whether it helps them advance cultural and operational metrics.

Ben Cash:

That being said, it isn't like oxygen in the airplane, where you take care of yourself first. If you address users needs first, and make their jobs easier, then they might be open to inspiration. That's where facilitation comes in, which I like to call it, task- oriented design. Task-oriented design is about putting user needs first.

Ben Cash:

What tasks are they trying to accomplish? And how can we make it easy? From our survey, we discovered that the most frequent tasks and those in most need of improvements are one and the same. In other words, imagine driving a car everyday, where drive reverse as a cup holder with diverse features, kind of sucks.

Ben Cash:

So task-oriented design also takes into account context. 71% of respondent to their mobile app was not useful. If the pandemic taught us anything it's that when, where, and how we work should be up to us. So what's the first step to embracing task-oriented design?

Ben Cash:

You want to look at, or install if you don't have it, your analytics. See what they use most and make a plan to improve those features. In other words, you can't improve what you can't measure. In a survey, we also asked if in charge, wouldn't that be nice? What would you do to improve your experience? Here are the top five answers we got.

Ben Cash:

Number one, it needs to be easy to use, navigate, and find content. Kind of a Captain Obvious situation there. Number two, search functionality has to rock, it needs a lot of love. Number three, graphic design could be better and more engaging. Number four, the lack of accuracy and timeliness of content is important and builds trust. Finally, the mobile experience needs to be more robust and effective.

Ben Cash:

Coincidentally or ironically, these are the few of the same areas that work collaborative with the Prisma Health team to address in their intranet redesign. Let's take a little side trip from the data for a moment, take a little break and see some of these improvements in practice and what the results were.

Ben Cash:

Also note that we're going to be sharing some mock-ups from the design process, given that we can actually show you the live intranet. So let's start with the dashboard. 72% of people use their intranet every day, if not multiple times a day. This is their jumping off point. Our goal was to find that balance between inspiration and facilitation.

Ben Cash:

So we kept consistent with our visual brand identity, and created multiple locations for engaging image driven content, including stories, news and events. We balance that with task oriented design, including tools, quick links, even navigation menus and the most popular call to action. We also know that all these things can change based on context, especially as remote workers arise.

Ben Cash:

So we tailored the intranet experience to how and where people work and implemented a dynamic setting that allows them actually to customize their alerts news and events based on where they're working. We also amped up that elusive alert bar to make sure important announcements don't get lost. And all of these were prioritized based on our user research and data in order to reduce friction and the most popular content and actions were one click away.

Ben Cash:

So looking for something specific or new? We also implemented a robust search that's user friendly across desktop and mobile, uses keywords, filters, tagging and publish dates. Users can trust the content is both relevant and current, both of which show up in the survey as drivers of negative experiences. We also applied the same search and navigation logic to popular content like news and events for consistency, just to make it easier to get that great content.

Ben Cash:

Furthering the task-orient approach, we also created an A to Z index and the bookmarking system to allow users to customize quick access to content or tools they use more frequently. Then you can see all pages across the intranet, and have the ability to add a bookmark.

Ben Cash:

We built them a design system that accounts for a multitude of templates and content types to help keep their brand as consistent as possible as the intranet expands over time. And one bonus item that now we're actually really proud of, was that we implemented a tutorial overlay to help the post-launch learning when users first dove in.

Ben Cash:

So, did all this pay off? Yep. As you can see here, from a recent screenshot of a dashboard, it's being used to engage their team at a critical time. It hasn't even been a year yet, and users are coming back more often and sticking around longer, not bad. So I'm going to again ask you to go to your chats and curious what the most important thing you believe would make your intranet's better.

Ben Cash:

Feel free to pop that in there. So it might be different for different organizations, but one thing we can all agree on is that choosing the right technology is critical to success. And I am going to admit here we're about to geek up, up a geek level a little bit. So, if you don't talking about tech now is a good time to top off that coffee maybe.

Ben Cash:

And for those of you who are left, let's talk about the elephant in the room. SharePoint. It was the most widely used platform in a survey by far coming in at 27%. After that things came in at single digits. According to Wikipedia, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system. While it's pretty configurable, what it is not is a platform for user experience. When we look at the top performing intranets, only 9% of them were on SharePoint.

Ben Cash:

Compare that with intranets, where IT played a lead role and it's 32%. So what does this tell us? That SharePoint is a technology decision, not one that puts users first. From personal experience, I can tell you, after two decades of conversations with marketing and the IT department, I found that most organizations decide to use SharePoint simply because they already own it. Put it another way, no one gets fired for saving money and using a tool you already have.

Ben Cash:

This is actually one of the biggest points of failure for intranet projects. And what's often the case, is no one is fully trained on it. And certainly not those in marketing and communications. And forgive the dad joke here with all due respect to Ron Popeil, there's really got to be a better way.

Ben Cash:

And from our perspective, the better way is to choose an experience based platform for your intranet. These are the same types of platforms you use to create those much love public sites. View them as content management systems or digital experience platforms to throw more acronyms at you, let's call it a DXP for short

Ben Cash:

And it just so happens, the next five most used platforms in the survey were experience-based. DXP are also built to manage and deliver content through a dynamic user experience across all devices. Most importantly, it can be designed and built the way you work rather than you have to conform to it.

Ben Cash:

So, given what we've said about engagement strategy, it's no surprise that intranets built on experience-based platforms, were seen as almost three times as effective than when built on SharePoint. Or to put it another way, 72% of intranets that were ranked one or a two out of five were built on SharePoint.

Ben Cash:

And in case it's not obvious by now Reason One and Greystone are not lobbyists for SharePoint. By the way, the trusted data correlation we found was that 44% of health organizations, using an experience-based platform also had a written strategy, compared with only 23% of organizations using SharePoint.

Ben Cash:

So the benefits of using an experience-based platform don't end there. You can build both your intranet and your public websites on the same platform, saving on license fees, easily sharing content and data between digital properties. Also, using a single platform means your content managers need less training and can more easily support both your external and internal sites, a clear benefit to those of you who are resource strapped.

Ben Cash:

All that sounds great, right? But I would venture a guess from many organizations that SharePoint still provides an important role in document management is not going to go away anytime soon. It's okay though, not to worry, it doesn't have to be an either or proposition. Most quality experience-based platforms have SharePoint connectors that allow you to maintain taxonomy and access in SharePoint while creating a more effective engaging experience for users.

Ben Cash:

This is a hybrid approach, that we've employed for some health organizations over the years. And as part of our toolkit we're going to provide you after this... We'll provide a high-level side-by-side comparison, including the pros and cons of the SharePoint, DXP and hybrid approach. So for those of you who are still looking at this point, thanks for kicking out with me a little bit. That's all I've got.

Lauren Minors:

That was a lot in 29 minutes. So again, thank you.

Ben Cash:

Sorry.

Lauren Minors:

No, that was... We got a lot of great data from the report that you guys are all going to get. So we threw a lot at you today about engagement, leadership, buy-in, testing, user experience, determining the best tech to support your successful and effective intranet. Let's take a breath. So what's next?

Lauren Minors:

We know making some of these changes can really feel trying to turn a cruise ship, right? And it's not going to happen overnight, but you can move the needle, starting where you are, using what you have, doing what you can. Regardless of where you find yourself on the continuum of needing improvement, here are some actions that you can take now to start the process.

Lauren Minors:

First, start a conversation about putting people first in your intranet. Put together a survey and your analytics data and all your feedback to share with your executive team. Really help them apply that same ROI thinking that they do to the external website internally to the intranet. Remember this is an audience that is visiting this digital property every single day. They are a captive audience.

Lauren Minors:

Examine the ownership of your intranet and how that affects the user experience. Is IT in charge, or is it MarComm and what would it take to make some adjustments and even that out a bit? Find out what your users top tasks are and all of their points of frustration and making a plan to address them. And finally use the toolkit that we're going to be sending out later in the week or next week and understand the right tech approach for your organization.

Lauren Minors:

Above all else, your intranet is the digital home for your team and taking a unified approach with a plan that engages leadership, MarComm, IT and all the other stakeholders that need to be at the table is actually the secret to creating an intranet that you and your entire team deserve. Everyone deserves a seat at that table and we're here to help. And so is Greystone.

Lauren Minors:

So one more poll if you feel like dropping it in the chat, please don't be shy to share. What's a first action that you are going to take to improve your intranet. Think about it and drop it in the chat.

Lauren Minors:

All right. So let's get started with some questions and we would like to welcome a couple of subject matter experts to the party. Joining us now are Michael Kinkaid, Reason One's, CTO, "Hey, Michael," and our Vice President of Client Services Kim Gibson, "Hey, welcome."

Kim Gibson:

Hello.

Lauren Minors:

So we have a couple of questions but, not a couple, quite a few actually that were submitted in advance that we'd like to start with. And then we'll get through as many other questions as we can as they come in during the next 15 to 20 minutes, or so. Michael, I think this first one is probably for you.

Micheal Kinkaid:

What are the top things to consider when migrating an intranet to a new CMS? So I think not so much a consideration, a bit more of a command, I think before you do anything, please, please do a content audit. You don't want to migrate still-outdated content, how-to guides for things that you as an organization stopped doing five years ago. Migrations are hard work.

Micheal Kinkaid:

So you don't want to waste time or effort because both of those things are money with content that just isn't relevant anymore. I think that, seeing as you're in the weeds of a migration, it's also the right time, take this opportunity to model your content. So to design how it's structured to make sure that it can work harder for you, make it modular so it can be reused, structure it so it's more flexible.

Micheal Kinkaid:

Tagging some of it, you talked about earlier, you can semantically categorize your content so that it's findable by your users and also, make it as independent as possible from how it's presented so that really it's easier to adapt across all the different channels that your employees are going to be consuming the content on.

Micheal Kinkaid:

I think, for the technologists on the call, another consideration for any new platform is going to be to fully consider security requirements and ensure that, the new rule light aligns with your information security policies. Where are you hosting? On premise infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, everything is as a service. What compliance and standards are required for the content and for hosting as well.

Micheal Kinkaid:

And regardless of where it's hosted, you're going to want single-sign-on role-based access control against your organization's identity provider. Being able to secure your intranet with multi-factor authentication against corporate clients. It really is a must, especially if you're considering giving access outside of the network or the VPN. So really make sure that in criteria like that is upfront and being evaluated and flagged long before any migration happens. So those are... There's a couple of considerations in one command, audit your content please.

Lauren Minors:

Sorry. Thank you, Michael. All right. Next question up, do you expect to see a shift or increase for the need of a mobile app? Either of you could take this?

Kim Gibson:

I mean, I'll jump first, yes. I mean, I know it sounds simplistic, but if you're intending for your intranet to be a source that someone can quickly use and you are in the... The way that you utilize your websites and stuff like that and tools across your organization, if you already are doing things on a mobile space, naturally, you would want to make sure that you're putting that same tool available in that same way.

Kim Gibson:

And people inherently are using their phones for just looking at calendars, looking at emails, looking at things like that. Those are things that are very intricacy is really combined with your intranet as well. Whether it's just accessing a quick file, a presentation, anything like that. Also depend upon what your organization does. If you have events and stuff people need to attend, you would want them to be able to interact with that in whatever way that they digest that information, reading a news articles or blog or anything that you do in your organization.

Kim Gibson:

Yes. So simplistically, you would want it to be available as a mobile app or at least developed on a site that is a progressive web app that can be done in a mobile environment. It doesn't have to be an app per se, I would say, but I don't know, Michael, if you want to interject, you might as well.

Micheal Kinkaid:

Nope, I absolutely agree. I don't need to mansplain, like here. The shift is already happened, over 50% of people liberalizing webs. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't work on mobile. It's like what happened? What went wrong with that project?

Kim Gibson:

Yeah. But that ties back to your point about security. Right? Because obviously mobile opens up a lot to that as well. So ensuring you understand your device policies and stuff around that, to be able to give people the flexibility to go to the intranet on whatever tool they're using.

Lauren Minors:

Absolutely. All right. What intranet solutions offer collaboration tools or integrations things like Microsoft Teams?

Micheal Kinkaid:

I can take that one. I think, so in terms of where to go find these platforms if you check something the Forrester Wave report on intranet platforms or g2.com, something that as CTO, I look at as well, then you're going to get a good sense of their range of platforms that are on the market today. And well-vetted platforms, to name-drop, like Igloo or Lifetiles or Simpler to name a few.

Micheal Kinkaid:

I know a big part of their value proposition is that they come with, low code or no code integrations that they ship with. And these integrations are going to include collaboration tools Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack and I think really it's these collaboration tools that dictate what can and can't be done with regards to integration, most collaboration tools... Actually most sort of software today worth its salt will provide an API.

Micheal Kinkaid:

If you find yourself needing to go above and beyond what the platform might be doing itself, something like Microsoft Teams, everything Microsoft 365 can be accessed by the graph API. Slack has an API, Discord has an API. So, taking an example of something like Microsoft Teams, there's actually... There's also the ability to extend your user interface in the team's app itself.

Micheal Kinkaid:

You can load intranet contents into things custom tabs and user interface. So, so not bringing teams to the intranet per se, but potentially the intranet into teams. So most platforms are going to have some type of integration, but if you need to go above and beyond, you can do it with the APIs.

Lauren Minors:

Awesome. And this goes hand in hand and also there was a question that was dropped in the questions box that I think is aligned with this as well. How are we augmenting intranets the two way communications tools and Rachel asked, what about using Yammer?

Micheal Kinkaid:

Yep. Yammer is Microsoft platform. It's got integration to some of their stack as well. Again, you've got the graph API there. I think really anything real-time should be on the real-time platform because again, they dictate what you can integrate with. So Zoom, Teams, Slack that's where your employees are interacting.

Micheal Kinkaid:

So the intranet may come with integrations to do things like link out to channels or embed tools that are going to alloy that. But then, more simply augmentation can start with promoting company communication where the people actually are using listings and directories on the intranet to promote the groups, to promote the channels to surface team sessions, and this can be certainly an important part of onboarding new employees that then knew where the communication, where the engagement is actually happening. So again, there's... You've got the out-of-the-box features, you've got APIs you can use to connect.

Micheal Kinkaid:

But quite often it's just important to let people know where to go. I think as an aside, just because communication has been so front and center for the past year and this is something that can be a tad counter-intuitive at first, but you got sort of real time, everyone on something like Zoom, isn't always the right fit.

Micheal Kinkaid:

Something we have seen during the past year is the need to make communication, more efficient. So to respect employees, time to focus. So video platforms such as Vidyard provide an easy and obvious way to do this, rather than eating 30 minutes of everyone's time on a schedule call, when all you're trying to do is share a status update, you instead record a video of your update using these tools and you can share that with employees on the intranet, so that they can watch it at a time that fits in with their work from home schedule. That's something that our COO who will actually start to do, which films are a really good time suits.

Lauren Minors:

That's a really good point about using those tools and thinking about how other people are going to be consuming that information. And then also building in those behavior change bits as to these are where these conversations are happening rather than just put the tool out there and expect people to sort of figure it out on their own.

Lauren Minors:

That's a really, really good insight. So Kim, I think you might have, or actually both of you might be able to answer this because we did this actually for Prisma, how do you successfully integrate your company's intranet and extranet and knowing that those two things and also the website on one whole platform, can you speak to that?

Kim Gibson:

I'll take the first and then let Michael kind of round it out. There's many ways of doing it, but one of the ways that you use the example of Prisma the intention was that is because of the type of nature of their business and such their employees not only use their public site either with the people they engage with or for their own uses depend upon the content that's there, but they obviously use the intranet.

Kim Gibson:

So it was very key to make sure that that experience was equally just as fluid for them. Which meant we maintained a lot of when it comes to also, they're both built on the same platform. So we leverage a lot of the same templates, a lot of the same widgets and components so that it was very understood from a user experience that those behaviors and everything would function the same within to the two sites.

Kim Gibson:

So they wouldn't have to be treating their intranet in a different fashion than they would be treating the public site. This also attributes to content and where it resided. If there was content that was being shared publicly in any way, it went and duplicated in the intranet, they would just make sure that there was a very clear way that that information can be consumed on the intranet, but it was potentially created within the extranet experience.

Kim Gibson:

So that was really to take in consideration that you have whoever your user base is of your technology often is in many different roles and the way that they consume it, and kind of to your point, you mentioned a second ago, Lauren is really understanding how they consume it when they consume it and need to.

Kim Gibson:

And so making that easy for the user was a big key. And there's also a lot of security pieces too, which I'll let Michael speak to in reference to how we did that also from a internal, Azure Directory is set up and stuff too.

Lauren Minors:

Oh yeah.

Micheal Kinkaid:

Yeah. Good. That's a good through. Like how do you successfully integrate lots of headaches and money? I think, obviously the full extent of what can be integrated is going to depend on what your intranet and your extranet of built on. So as Kim said, the benefit of us being on the same platform is that there's obviously a lot of options there in terms of what can be shared.

Micheal Kinkaid:

I think, regardless of what the platform is, you're still going to want to see Robust API, Webhooks and as Kim outlined with the security issue. Security is going to be huge here. There's definitely a trend which makes sense in terms of consolidating things like identity management for employees, for extra users, for members, for customers and consulting not to one service can still be multiple user stores, for example, Azure Active Directory for your employees as your B2B or B2C for your non-employees.

Micheal Kinkaid:

It doesn't have to be Azure to give it a few times, but, this obviously a growing area of the market. So you'll see players like Okta paying off who, providers that will allow you to make sure that you can effectively secure your intranet and your extranets with the same concepts and security around things like MFA as well. So, it's definitely a lot of services out there now that make these types of integrations possible.

Lauren Minors:

Awesome. And we have a couple more questions that have come in, really good questions. This goes back to some of the things we were just talking about. Michael was asking, what is your experience or guidance on building a targeted communication system, interactive user experience, including things like comments, liking, forums, that sort of thing.

Micheal Kinkaid:

I think the-

Kim Gibson:

No, no, no. You go ahead first. Yeah.

Micheal Kinkaid:

As I was saying, that's one of the benefits of... With DXP platform versus either your standalone intranet SharePoint or a more traditional web content management system is the whole intention that DXP is the focus is on experience. So it is customer engagement tracking, it's scoring, it's profiling, it's going to have a personalization engine. It's going to give you a more robust search so that you can actually start to have smart analysis in terms of the content people are looking at, what they're engaging with.

Micheal Kinkaid:

So, I think that that's really one of the values of these platforms because they are a lot more mature and they're not so specifically focused on just documents, lists, staff profiles. You're going to get a lot more there to play with, when it comes to things like content targeting and also features around things commenting, message boards, stuff like that.

Micheal Kinkaid:

Although to be honest, they also will provide the APIs that will allow you to integrate with dedicated services for that. Because again, that's part of one of the benefits having that flexibility, to be able to bring other tools that are specifically focused on that one aspect of engagement and bring that into your role solution versus you being all in one.

Kim Gibson:

Yeah. And just to add onto that too, I just want to say that also depends on what your organizational culture is and how you're wanting to leverage those things. Because the need for commenting, liking and sharing is very geared around social media and the social interaction of things. If you're doing that as a means of just judging interaction and engagement, you can do that through simple, analytics of how read time and how people interact on it without needing people to actually directly comment or send likes and stuff like that.

Kim Gibson:

So it's really thinking about what the intention is for those behaviors. We've seen more increasingly that a lot of organizations are moving away from that behavior in their intranet and more focusing on just doing the analytics and the read of how people are more of a net per member score concentration on how people are interacting with the tool, less than the social media construct of it, in that regard.

Lauren Minors:

They're great insights Kim and Michael, thank you. Any other questions we have just a couple minutes left. Pop them in that question box if you've got them. Right. I don't see any more, but you might have questions that you're holding back and that's okay. But we're close to time, wanted to thank everybody again for your time today and an awesome discussion.

Lauren Minors:

If we didn't get your question answered today, we're here. We're here, Greystone is here. Everyone's contact information is up on the screen right now. Just go ahead and take a screenshot and we want to give a huge, huge thanks to Mike Schneider and Farrah Hunt for helping us put together this study to analyze all of the data 17,000 different ways so that we really could find what the true secret of a successful intranet is.

Lauren Minors:

So thank you, thank you so much. They have some great resources and we are always here to talk. We'll also be sharing a toolkit in the coming week or so that you will all get, and you'll also be able to get a copy of the full report. So you'll get all of the data if you didn't get enough charts, graphs, numbers, and percentages today. So, thank you all and have a great rest of your week and weekend.

Ben Cash:

Thanks everybody.