My Highlights from The Digital Workplace Trends Report 2012 by @netjmc - part 2

In my last post  I shared some of my highlights from Jane McConnell's Global Digital Workplace Trends 2012 report. We left off describing how some organizations used their intranet to support employees in the field. This brings us to the mobile intranet.

Mobiel intranet
Delivering the intranet and digital workplace to mobile was seen as important by 7% of the respondents in 2011. In 2012 30% thinks mobile is important and is investing. I'm disappointed to see that IT is defining the strategy in this area, according to the report. The goal of mobile is to improve communication and productivity. Corporate news and the people finder are the most important mobile intranet features. I would hope mobile is a business initiative with business in the lead and that the mobile features would be more closely related to the core business processes. I'm curious what we'll see in next year's report with respect to mobile.
A special finding from the report was that organizations with many employees without direct access to the intranet, are able to define clear goals for mobile intranet. And most mobile intranets are based on the existing platform of the intranet.
Location-based services are still in an early phase (45% has plans in this direction). In most organizations mobile services via intranet don't have a high priority. On the other hand 35% already have mobile services for their external customers (internet). Security and costs are the biggest barriers to work on mobiel intranet.

Intranet leadership
When can you say your organization is in the leading league of intranets? The report shows one of the following categories have to apply:
  1. The digital workplace is the primary workspace
  2. Internal social tools are well-integrated in the organization
  3. A fully-functioning digital steering committee makes strategic decisions over the internal and external development of digital channels.
Only six of the respondents have reached this level!

Intranet governance
The ownership and management of the intranet is mostly the responsibility of Communications and IT. Sometimes HR also joins the group. Business functions hardly ever have a role in governance and management. An interest fact is that organizations reported when they moved ownership of the intranet to Knowledge Management and HR this was very beneficial to them.
Only 17% of the organizations have a digital steering committee, strategically directing the internal and external digital information and communication streams. The primary business functions are part of this committee.
Ownership and governance still don't receive the attention they need in most organizations. The leading intranet organizations do spend a lot of time and money in this area. Most other respondents say they are working on improving the intranet organization.
I like the way the report distinguishes between companies with lots of operational employees without a computer and companies in which almost all have a computer. The report mentioned an intriguing fact in this context: Companies that have a deep integration of their intranet with the primary processes, are mostly companies with many operational employees. The report shows that many companies are working on this deeper integration.
Related to governance is also measurement. 75% of the respondents don't measure at all. The most mentioned metrics on the collaborative side of the intranet are 'satisfaction' and 'activity' of users. In other parts of the intranet 'activity' is swapped by 'reach within the company’. 

That's my summary of this year's report! I want to congratulate Jane with her newest report. Lots of work has been put into it. And now we get to reap from the results! Thanks, Jane.

Of course the 160 page report contains more than I can describe here. You can order the full Digital Workplace report here. By the way, if you fill out the survey, you get the report for free!

And again, I'm wondering: 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?

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