My Highlights from the Digital Workplace Trends Report 2012 by @netjmc - part 1

There's one great place to go if you want an overall update on the intranet and digital workplace state-of-the-art and that's Jane McConnell's yearly Digital Workplace Trends Report.

Just like in previous years I read the report and would like to highlight parts of the report for you in two posts. In another post I'll reflect a bit on this year's findings. I hope this will trigger you to buy and read the report for yourself. There's much more in the report than I can write about here.

From intranet to digital workplace

This year more than 400 organizations participated in Jane's 6th survey. The title of the report shows how much development there is in the intranet landscape. We are moving from intranet to digital workplace.

And Jane has been documenting this trend for several years. I think this year is the first year I hear more people talk about the digital workplace than intranet. Of course this broadening of the scope of Jane's survey and report also brings along some difficulties (for Jane...). The digital workplace is a much bigger topic than intranet.

Fragmented digital workplace

The intranet was mostly about the traditional internal digital publishing platform with static content. The digital workplace collects all the online, internal content and applications a knowledge worker needs to get things done. The report shows only a small number of organizations has a central, uniform digital workplace. Most have a fragmented landscape, consisting of separate tools.

Still can't find anything

Search is still horrible. Hardly any organizations are happy with their intranet search. Leading organizations pay much more attention to improving search. Users are frequently polled to test search results, search patterns and data are analyzed, and functionality, like tagging, is added to improve search.

Concerns

Information security is a concern for many companies with respect to the digital workplace. As is the quality of information. Other concerns are the influence of the social platforms on the company's structure and culture, and multi-linguality.

Enterprise 2.0

More and more companies are rolling out internal social media. Usually this is set up next to the existing intranet and is integrated into it over time. On the other hand only 8 % is working on organization-wide deployment of internal social media. The data seems to show that bottom-up roll outs are stagnating. But still 50% of the respondents is investing in this area. As you would expect podcasting and social bookmarking are used the least internally. And ‘prediction markets’ (although they were popular some time ago) and ‘gamification’ (now very trending, for sure on the Web) are not mentioned at all.

Internal social media ROI

What most organizations get from internal social media is well known. Improved knowledge sharing, recognition and location of experts, etc. Cost reduction and faster market penetration is not mentioned a lot. As is improvement of and integration with business processes. The report does show that successful internal and external adoption of social media are related.

Intranet in the field

I really enjoyed the section in the report about 'intranet in the field'. Some organizations shared how they use their intranet to support employees in the field, working directly with customers. Those employees could connect to the internal company and ask questions, consult the internal procedures, etc. This topic relates to mobile intranet. I'll share the mobile trends in the next post.

So, do you recognize the above-mentioned trends? What do you think are the most important Digital Workplace trends? And, what are the biggest challenges for organizations with respect to their (future) intranet?

I'll post part 2 of my highlights in a couple of days.

Have a nice weekend! :-)