Businesses spend billions of dollars annually in an effort to improve IT infrastructures, with a staggering 88% expected to increase IT budgets through the end of 2020. For these investments to truly deliver positive and long-lasting change, companies need to ensure they’re choosing the right systems and processes that integrate seamlessly with one another, instead of creating added work or headaches.
The alternative is new, exciting systems that look good on paper, but only end up serving specific business units or talking with other discrete systems, creating silos of information for the teams using them. The result is the investment isn’t worth it, and the benefits are never truly brought to life. This is particularly true for corporate intranets, which serve your most important stakeholders—your employees—but need to be considered as another digital channel that’s an extension of your brand, not merely a digital file cabinet.
Finding the right solutions and ensuring they integrate seamlessly with the rest of the tech stack can be especially difficult for digital teams that are tasked with ensuring their brand’s image and messaging are consistent across all internal and external channels. What they need to succeed is one source of truth that ensures regular and streamlined output.
That single source of truth is an intranet that integrates with other proprietary and third-party systems, and that allows companies to create a distinctive site that’s unique to their organization and employee needs, while also working in harmony with their corporate site. Especially in light of COVID-19, 70% of teams report their intranet CMS as being valuable or very valuable to employees, reaffirming that businesses must consider intranet integration capabilities when implementing new technology. Your employee intranet CMS is not only a communications hub, but a critical data and information hub for internal systems and tools.
Out with the old with your existing employee intranet
Taking a holistic view of the content development and publishing process, it typically involves large teams spanning different business units that have unique output goals, which means their information sources are often dissimilar and inconsistent. Prior to intranet implementation, teams were responsible for finding resources and information on their own, which could leave room for error and create the risk of publishing content that was incorrect—and in some cases harmful—to an organization’s brand. The slow, discrepant process of teams searching for information in disparate locations became especially problematic when it cost organizations time and money.
Today, an intranet solution should be considered an extension of an organization’s content management system. Implementing an intranet that has integrations built-in to solve for these inefficiencies, and one that can seamlessly pull from disparate sources without disrupting processes, creates more cohesive workflows and saves time at each step.
In with the new: How to transform your employee intranet
Companies are using a plethora of systems (think: authentication, payroll, calendaring, time tracking, task management, directories and more) to keep day-to-day operations running smoothly for both internal and external stakeholders. Given the wide variety of systems companies are leveraging and how frequently they’re making changes to their technology stacks, it’s important to have a solution that ties everything together, engaging the team that’s using it while increasing their productivity.
Brightspot helps organizations build the digital workplace intranet designed to foster a secure, lively and engaged community through highly-personalized, contextually-relevant interactions. The Brightspot GO Intranet solution is complete with pre-built component libraries, powerful migration tools and an easy-to-learn publishing platform that ensures interoperability with existing and evolving tech stacks, requiring little to no support from the IT department.
Some other important out-of-the-box features that will accelerate speed-to-market and provide seamless, low-hassle integrations over time include easy authentication with existing systems like Active Directory and SAML, simple employee directory setup, and specialized content types unique to corporate communications needs like presentations, spreadsheets and brochures, for example.
Brightspot also offers headless and front-end agnostic solutions, allowing organizations to integrate proprietary sources, enterprise applications and other software to create a unified intranet experience without back-end challenges.
What does it look like when it all comes together? Organizations gain an employee intranet solution that has:
- A meaningful, simplified user experience with engaging content types and personalized task management.
- A consistent flow of information from third-party data sources and a “go-to” single source of truth (e.g. consistent asset management).
- An extensible architecture that operates as a unified content management system, allowing brands to manage all proprietary sources from one CMS.
Ultimately, with Brightspot, companies are able to take advantage of an intranet that delivers content to their most important stakeholders, breaking down silos to bring everything together in one place. It’s a win-win for all.
