FROM THE REPORT
“Reference customers rate Akumina’s content repository and authoring capabilities highly, along with its design and internal communication features.”
- The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms, Q1 2022
Insights from FORRESTER
The Appetite For Custom-Built, Homegrown Intranets Is Dead
The intranet market has undergone a major reinvention over the last few years. New, cloud-native platforms have shattered the stereotype of static, clunky, internal portals.
Since The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2020, customer demand has decidedly shifted away from “build” to “buy.” Today intranets are software as a service (SaaS) apps and are designed for the communicators, designers, and authors who are responsible for creating relevant, tailored information for employees in an anywhere-work environment.
Orchestrated delivery of content and communication, personalized for specific roles and employee personas, now supersedes generic corporate or departmental home pages. It’s not surprising that satisfaction levels with intranets have begun to improve. While intranets still lag in satisfaction behind everyday productivity tools such as email, calendars, and authoring apps, Forrester data shows that information workers are reporting higher satisfaction for intranets — 75% reported satisfaction in 2021 compared to 66% in 2019.
As a result of these trends, intranet platform customers should look for providers that:
- Support personalization that is both top-down and bottom-up. Internal communication is now a top driver for organizations investing in a new intranet platform. One-size-fits-all email blasts cause employees to tune out when information is not relevant to their role, geography, or mission. Employee communication pros now demand tools to segment their internal audiences, develop personas, and design content for various channels, such as mobile notifications, email newsletters, or feeds inside a collaboration app. Employees also want to be empowered to set their preferences for language, topics, or consumption frequency.
- Integrate with essential enterprise applications. Modern intranets don’t insert themselves as a default home page at every turn. Innovative platforms deliver content and communication into the employee’s work experience contextually. Deep integrations for productivity suites, such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, are the norm. Integrations with key digital operations platforms, such as human capital management, enterprise service management, and customer relationship management, now include opportunities to deliver tasks from these systems to users, helping to avoid the distraction of context-switching.
- Orchestrate content and communication across employee journeys. Intranet platforms have taken cues from marketing and email automation technologies. Communication and employee experience (EX) pros now benefit from testing tools and analytics to improve the reach and effectiveness of their communications. Emerging capabilities include templates for common journeys (such as new employee onboarding), editorial calendars, workflows to automate campaigns (such as phased communications over a long-term program), and reporting to gain insights into content performance (such as views of text vs. video formats).