2020 evolution of the intranet survey...employees, yet most intranets are standalone document...

Enterprise intranets gain increasing importance, yet struggle to align technology and goals

2020 Evolution of the Intranet Survey

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2020 evolution of the intranet survey

The 2020 Evolution of the Intranet Survey is published by Simpler Media Group.Our family of brands:

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table of contents

Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Legacy Intranet Platforms May Be Losing Their Foothold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

The IT / Line of Business Disconnect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Core Intranet ROI Centers on Business Efficiency, But Has Noticeable Gaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

The COVID-19 Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Questions the Survey Raises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

About This Survey ......................................................................................................18 Our methodology ........................................................................................................18 About the respondents ..............................................................................................18 About Brightspot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 About CMSwire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

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When we launched this survey, in March 2020, this research was intended to quantify the return on investment of the corporate intranet. Due to our timing, however, it has also become a benchmark of the moment in time that the company intranet became an essential touchpoint for companies around the world.

During the COVID-19 crisis, the intranet became a critical tool to provide employees with a sense of continuity and unity, as millions of workers across the United States and around the world worked from home in response to shelter-in-place mandates. A few key insights:

The survey results reflected Microsoft Sharepoint’s market penetration, with 33% of respondents selecting it as their current intranet platform

• However, 21% of respondents don’t know who provides their intranet solution

• Another 13% of respondents don’t have an intranet

The top three intranet goals were:

• Enable collaboration with teams across the enterprise (58%)

• Educate employees on the company’s mission, vision, and values (43%)

• Document and share institutional knowledge (43%)

Overview







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70% feel their intranet is valuable or very valuable to employees, yet most intranets are standalone document repositories that are not being integrated into the myriad other services employees rely on to get their jobs done

• Outlook is the most integrated (50%) due to the ubiquity of the platform’s use in the enterprise and the high percentage of Sharepoint users

• Slack, which has replaced many routine email activities, is only integrated in 34% of cases

• There is a disparity amongst intranet goals from IT — which sees the intranet as primarily a document repository — as compared to the rest of the business that suggests this rating may not be as rosy as it seems.

As we delve deeper into these findings, we hope to highlight areas in which the IT team — who made up the bulk of our respondents — can collaborate with people managers and the HR team to create a more engaging employee intranet experience that, in turn, has the potential to have a positive impact on employee productivity and the digital employee experience.

Although the bulk of our responses came in the midst of this unprece-dented crisis, about 20% of our responses were before the widespread COVID-19 remote work orders. Towards the end of this report, we will delve into a few areas where we saw a noticeable shift in attitudes in response to the changing business environment.







While Microsoft’s SharePoint may not be the original intranet platform, it frequently is a company’s first enterprise intranet platform deployed due to its bundling with the Microsoft Office suite of products. This ubiquity was reflected in the survey results, with 33.38% of those surveyed reporting their organization’s intranet runs on SharePoint.

The actual penetration of the product may be wider than this, however, taking into account other survey results, including 20% (largely outside of the IT function) reporting they are unaware of what platform their organi-zation is using to support their intranet.

Rounding out the core results, 20% of respondents are using a platform not listed in the selection criteria for hosting their intranet, and 12.8% of those who responded stated they don’t have an intranet. The latter group was excluded from answering any further questions in the survey.

Legacy Intranet Platforms May Be Losing Their Foothold


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Desire to Consolidate Tech Platforms Is the Likely Cause

Legacy intranet platforms like SharePoint have been primarily marketed to the enterprise as document repositories and as a replacement for physical employee directories. SharePoint has been used to deploy some organization’s external websites, but this has typically been only in the most Microsoft-centric organizations, since there are many more robust and user-friendly platforms for website content management.

As technology has proliferated throughout the enterprise, however, many organizations have sought to streamline and reduce the size of their tech stack — including those used for internal communications. Our

What technology is powering your intranet?

MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT

I DON'T KNOW

OTHER

WE DON'T HAVE AN INTRANET

BLINK

ZOHO CONNECT

YAMMER

HCL CONNECTIONS

ONSEMBLE INTRANET PORTAL

SIMPPLR

SPEAKAP

12.9%3.0%

.8%

2.6%

SOURCE: SMG/CMSWIRE EVOLUTION OF THE INTRANET 2020








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survey found that 31.21% are using the same platform for their website and intranet, with another 8.99% stating they aren’t doing this yet but are planning to do so.

On the surface, this can be interpreted as good news for the more robust content management systems. But it may also reflect a lack of insight into the IT infrastructure by those outside of that departmental structure.

Some IT departments with long-standing Microsoft contracts have required their organization to use SharePoint for external facing websites, for ease of integration with their existing infrastructure. On the other hand, many small organizations start out with an intranet that consists of a few HTML pages on a private web server. And both of those scenarios could be accounted for in the above responses.

Do you use the same platform for your intranetand your external website(s)?

No, but we areplanning to do so

9%

31% 60%









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Due to the large number of people who were not aware of what platform their intranet was running on, we took a look at the data points again, separating the responses from those working within the IT organization (which made up 21.72% of respondents) from those from the rest of the organization.

The data shows a potential knowledge gap in the internal technology infrastructure between the IT team and the rest of the organization. For example, 47% of IT respondents stated their company uses SharePoint for their intranet, while less than 30% of the line of business (LOB) respondents chose that response. Similarly, 14% of LOB respondents reported not having an intranet while only 6% of IT respondents reported the same.

There being such a significant difference in the answers from these two groups is very likely an indication that the LOB users are not aware of the underlying technology that powers their intranet because they aren’t actively using it—or maintaining content on it—in their daily work.

The IT/Line of Business Disconnect








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IT and LOB Need Better Alignment to Reach Corporate Intranet ROI Goals

While companies have admirable goals for their intranet’s employee outcomes, the actual deployments don’t deliver the functionality needed for the employees outside of the IT function to streamline their work processes.

Survey respondents cited the top three intranet goals as:

These goals indicate organizations intend their intranets to be a core communications and collaboration tool across the enterprise. However, many companies don’t think it’s important to connect the intranet to employee-embraced and frequently used tools like Slack, Workday, Salesforce, etc.

Integration percentages

Enable collaboration with teams across the

enterprise

58%

Document and share

institutional knowledge

43%

Educate employees on the company’s

mission, vision, and values

43%

Outlook is the most integrated service due to the widespread use of SharePoint

Outlook

50%

Slack

34%

Gmail

26%

Salesforce

23%

Workday

22%









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Despite the lack of integrations with vital employee workflow tools and services, 70% of respondents reported that they feel their intranet is valuable or very valuable to employees. This suggests company expecta-tions for their intranets have been pretty basic. But as we see below, when breaking out data from before the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders versus after, intranets are now needing to work harder to meet employee—and corporate—expectations.

Disagreement Exists on Vital Intranet Integrations

Taking a deeper look at the data from the IT team as compared to the rest of the organization, there is a gap between IT’s perceptions of what the intranet should integrate with and what the other intranet users find to be important:

These variances indicate a need for the IT team to collaborate with HR, and specific business stakeholders to better understand critical employee workflows that the intranet could be the key for integrating and streamlining.

IT Team Other Intranet Users

Slack isunimportantto integrate

67%

Salesforce isunimportantto integrate

60% 48% 48%

Slack isunimportantto integrate

Salesforce isunimportantto integrate









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What are your top 3 intranet objectives?

How valuable is your intranet perceived to beby your employees?

33.5%

Veryvaluable

Somewhatvaluable

37%

Neutral

20.1%

Not veryvaluable

6.1%

Of li�le tono value

3.2%

How valuable is your intranet perceived to beby your employees?

33.5%

Veryvaluable

Somewhatvaluable

37%

Neutral

20.1%

Not veryvaluable

6.1%

Of li�le tono value

3.2%










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What platforms do you currently integrateyour intranet with?

Google Suite

22.3%

56.8% 20.9%

Gmail

26.3%

57.6%16.2%

ADP

18.0%

64.7% 17.3%

Slack

13.3%

33.8%52.9%

Salesforce

23.0%

51.8%25.9%

Outlook

57.2%24.5%

18.3%

Workday

22.7%

61.5% 15.8%

Other

33.8%43.9%

22.3%

INTEGRATE WANT TO INTEGRATE NOT IMPORTANT









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When thinking about intranet ROI, most companies think of it in terms of efficiency and cost savings. Specifically, more than 50% of respondents chose each answer below as places where the intranet has delivered ROI:

Reduction in paper and printing costs Time saved searching for company information,

process, etc.

The third most often cited ROI area was productivity, with 41.73% citing the intranet providing ROI in streamlined workflows and business processes. Yet, despite this acknowledgment as an important and valuable potential area for ROI, as noted above, many IT teams are not focused on integrating the essential tools and services that would create a more seamless employee digital experience and truly deliver increased productivity.

This disconnect between intent and action may be why, despite the investment and focus, other research has consistently found employees frequently aren’t that engaged with the intranet. For an intranet to

Core Intranet ROI Centers on Business Efficiency, But Has Noticeable Gaps








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become a core part of an exceptional employee digital experience, to help streamline workflows, and automate repetitive administrative busy-work, companies will need to step up their intranet game. A robust digital employee experience relies upon an intranet that can serve as an employee's interface to the network of tools and services they need to get their work done — beyond speeding up access to company documents and files.

Which of the following are ways in which yourintranet has shown ROI for your company?

Reduction in paper and printing costs

Time saved searching for company information, process, etc.

Streamlines workflows and business processes

Fewer all-company emails sent

Replaced paper employee directories

Increased NPS

Improved employee retention

Improved recruitment efforts

How do you measure ROI in your Intranet efforts?

27.3%Productivity

EmployeeEngagement

30.2%

Adoption/Usage

42.5%










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In comparing responses the survey received in March, when the COVID-19 crisis was emerging in the U.S., to those received in April, when most states had mandated shelter-in-place orders, we saw some changes in perceptions around the value and utility of the intranet, potentially from increased use and awareness as more employees shifted to remote work.

Before April, just 12% of respondents were neutral about their intranet’s value, but post-March, this increased to 23% who were neutral. This may indicate that many respondents who would have otherwise thought their existing intranet was adequate found that it actually was not sufficient for what needed to be achieved when the bulk of their workforce was working outside the physical office and firewall.

This was particularly pronounced with Sharepoint intranet site users, who saw a jump in those whose responses were neutral, paired with a signif-icant decrease in percentage of respondents ranking their intranet as somewhat valuable:

The COVID-19 Effect

Neutral

Not very valuable

Of li�le to no value

Somewhat valuable

Very valuable

21%

9%

4%

35%

32%

9%

7%

2%

51%

30%

POST-COVID PRE-COVID








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Some other key attitude shifts as more companies shifted to remote work during this time:

• Slack saw a big jump in importance to integrate (26% in March to 36% in April), paired with a decline from 61% saying it wasn’t important to integrate in March to 50% in April

• Increase in interest to integrate Outlook (18% in March rose to 26% in April)

• Workday integration interest increased (18% in March to 24% in April)

• Adoption and usage became more important metrics for success (38% in March rose to 44% in April)








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Since the first intranet software was introduced in the 90s, we’ve seen its purpose and goals evolve and shift with the ever-changing tech stacks. There have been surges of interest in having the intranet be a tool that employees are able to directly engage with to make their workflow smoother, followed by retreats back to the intranet as a file repository and employee directory.

But as workplaces grapple with the many new restrictions around physical workplaces, designed to contain the spread of COVID-19 and future disruptions, we expect to see organizations challenged with answering and taking action upon a few common questions:

• Is IT making technology decisions based on freebies from their vendor? For example, many organizations received SharePoint for free as part of the enterprise Microsoft Office Suite deployment.

• Does IT have enough interaction and engagement with the rest of the organization to make informed decisions about intranet and other employee digital experience platforms?

• Could IT find better ways to work with HR to understand employee workflows and needs?

• Are individual departments going around IT to deploy their own tools and workflow solutions? This is how organizations end up with multiple, siloed instances of Slack, Salesforce, and other tools that should ideally be one integrated and shared single source of truth for the entire organization.

Questions That the Survey Raises








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The corporate intranet used to be a place where the code of conduct and myriad other company rules, guidelines, and documentation slumbered until an issue arose.

But in today’s global economy — even before the COVID-19 crisis — with increasing numbers of employees working outside of the corporate walls, companies have struggled to find the right way to reach everyone with mission-critical communications. This survey was conducted with this in mind, to define the ROI companies are seeing from their intranet, and better understand what defines the most successful intranets.

Our Methodology

Readers and followers of CMSWire were invited to respond to the 2020 Evolution of the Intranet Survey, which was conducted from March 5, 2020 through April 23, 2020. The survey report is based on an analysis of the full and partial results of these 746 respondents to the Survey.

About the Respondents

The majority of respondents (50.94%) work at companies of 200 employees or fewer, while 23.86% work at enterprise-level companies of 5,000-plus employees.

About 22% work in IT or engineering and 14.88% of respondents work in marketing and PR. Other departments included sales, HR, and C-suite.

The largest concentration of respondents work in information technology (26.27%), followed by business/professional services (16.76%).

About This Survey








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What is your organization’s size?

1 TO 100EMPLOYEES41.2% 101 TO 200

EMPLOYEES9.8%

501 TO 2,000EMPLOYEES9.1%

2,001 TO 5,000EMPLOYEES7.5%5,001 TO 10,000

EMPLOYEES5.2%

8.6%

201 TO 500EMPLOYEES

10.0%

50,000+EMPLOYEES

10,001 TO 50,000EMPLOYEES8.6%

What is your organization’s size?

1 TO 100EMPLOYEES41.2% 101 TO 200

EMPLOYEES9.8%

501 TO 2,000EMPLOYEES9.1%

2,001 TO 5,000EMPLOYEES7.5%5,001 TO 10,000

EMPLOYEES5.2%

8.6%

201 TO 500EMPLOYEES

10.0%

50,000+EMPLOYEES

10,001 TO 50,000EMPLOYEES8.6%









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Which of the following best describesyour industry?

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

BUSINESS/PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

OTHER

FINANCIAL SERVICES

PUBLIC EDUCATION

MANUFACTURING, ENGINEERING AND PRODUCTION

PRIVATE EDUCATION

PUBLIC HEALTHCARE

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

COMSUMER SERVICES

STATE, CITY, LOCAL GOVERNMENT

PRIVATE HEALTHCARE

MEDIA/ENTERTAINMENT

HOSPITALITY

CONSTRUCTION/PROPERTY

DISTRIBUTION/TRANSPORTATION

ENERGY & OIL/GAS & UTILITIES

RETAIL/WHOLESALE

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

5.4%

3.2%

Which of the following best describesyour industry?

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

BUSINESS/PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

OTHER

FINANCIAL SERVICES

PUBLIC EDUCATION

MANUFACTURING, ENGINEERING AND PRODUCTION

PRIVATE EDUCATION

PUBLIC HEALTHCARE

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

COMSUMER SERVICES

STATE, CITY, LOCAL GOVERNMENT

PRIVATE HEALTHCARE

MEDIA/ENTERTAINMENT

HOSPITALITY

CONSTRUCTION/PROPERTY

DISTRIBUTION/TRANSPORTATION

ENERGY & OIL/GAS & UTILITIES

RETAIL/WHOLESALE

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

5.4%

3.2%








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What department do you work in?

IT / ENGINEERING

MARKETING / PR

HUMAN RESOURCES

C-SUITE / EXECUTIVE

SALES / BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

ADMINISTRATIVE

DIGITAL / WEB / E-COMMERCE

OPERATIONS

INDEPENDENT CONSULTANT

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

FINANCE

INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

LINE OF BUSINESS

REAL ESTATE / FACILITIES

LEGAL









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About Brightspot

At Brightspot we believe technology should enable content-focused teams to work smarter, faster, and

more seamlessly to move businesses forward. With decades of experience in publishing and media, we help companies transform their business content and digital experiences by creating enterprise applications at scale with astonishing speed. The Brightspot platform powers dynamic and highly engaging consum-er and employee experiences for global brands such as The Los Angeles Times, Walmart, Univision, Mattress Firm, Sotheby’s, and U.S. News.

About CMSwire

CMSWire.com, published by Simpler Media Group, Inc, is read by over 3 million influential digital and marketing executives a month. Our daily updates keep you in the know about digital customer experience, digital

workplace technologies and practices, and the latest on intelligent information management. Founded by Brice Dunwoodie in 2003, CMSWire has drawn together the world's largest community of senior digital leaders.






https://simplermedia.com

https://www.cmswire.com/author/brice-dunwoodie/

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