We have had so many thousands of conversations over the last 14 years about “intranet functionality” – new clients asking us if we have this and that feature to enable them to compare us to some other potential partner in a spreadsheet, an RFP or a simple subjective decision.
As intranets evolve to become enormously powerful gateways to the digital workplace we have seen the argument shifting away from low level functionality such as ‘can I book a taxi using your system?’ to much higher level discussions that really make a difference to what a client can achieve. And that’s what we so enjoy.
When clients look for real value from a web platform they are really, it seems to me – asking some perfectly valid and basic questions about capabilities in the following areas :
- Information management – full indexing of version controlled documents, a variety of file types, record management, configurable metadata – and a world class permission system.
- News and internal communication – permission based news systems, announcements and blogs.
- Compliance – policy must reads, full auditing, audit management modules.
- Design – can the design be really, truly inspirational or just a logo and a style guide?
- Corporate social media – does the platform offer true engagement to get the users really engaged with the information.
- Business Processes – we have a lot of processes that are not the most efficient – can we move these onto the web platform and produce powerful form based workflows that help us to understand our process workloads, requirements and increase our efficiency.
- Mobile – is your offering capable of reaching out to our modern workforce with a range of needs on multiple devices.
- Deployment – do you offer truly global, cross platform, cloud or perpetual in house offerings?
- API – can we reliable and efficiently call out information to use in our own applications – for example using REST.
What we have noticed in the last couple of years is that our clients are enjoying the combination of these powerful capabilities. “It’s great to have simple business processes like recruitment that can call on document management resources, all within a permissioned process portal”. “Extensive business logic, with a corporate social media interaction available on top”. “A communication platform with commenting and Facebook style status updates and micro blogging.” “Great – Active directory integration combined with being able to log in with my Google ID.”
This is indeed powerful, and for us as a partner in these spaces really exciting. By all means start with the web platform functionality that meets your short term urgent business needs, but then add significant areas to work in a combination that is truly powerful, and makes a significant difference to your business.
The functionality discussion is moving up to truly interesting large scale areas of business needs. To me this is a natural extension of the debate, as the workplace goes digital, social and mobile and more and more fundamental business tasks and requirements are met by cross platform browser based web platforms that can grow with your business – like Claromentis.
And by the way, in case it’s raining out there – yes you can book a taxi – you just need a very simple business process for that task – with notifications, assignments and service level agreements.
