Intranets were created for many to consume content and few to create it. With the amount of content on intranets today, they have become a “content graveyard” for employees, rather than the vibrant and knowledge sharing community they can be. Traditional, keyword-based intranet search is not powerful enough to help employees sift through content to find the relevant insights they need.
Employees may not be banging on your door to improve the intranet, but the ripple effect of poor intranet can be found in the organizational communication barriers that it creates. When employees don’t have a central hub for sharing knowledge and expertise, they work in organizational silos. Think Mutual Bank, for example, saw that employees were finding it difficult to share their information with colleagues and vice versa. Their intranet was too cumbersome and provided very little remedy to the situation. Upgrading to intelligent intranet search as part of an intranet relaunch changed their corporate culture.
Enterprise Social Networks Won’t Replace the Employee Intranet
Many HR and IT teams have turned to enterprise collaboration applications as a fix for this. This is a vanity solution that fails to solve the real issue of relevance of content on the intranet.
Imagine a researcher at a Fortune 50 healthcare company on their first day after training. After being given the database of information on all of the team’s projects, he or she may want more information on a project that is tangentially related to their own, hoping that an insight from that team will guide them to a hypothesis. Without knowing the names of the projects, the researcher can message a more experienced coworker on one of these tools for help, but that depends on the coworker’s availability and understanding of the researcher’s context, not to mention if the coworker is even the right person to approach for this question.
What does the new employee really need? A way to find the relevant insights from the experienced employee on the intranet. Enterprise collaboration tools don’t provide this. They are merely a platform for receiving relevant information, but their technology won’t solve the relevance problem. What will? AI-powered search, or specifically an insight engine that delivers exactly the content
Look for this real story from a Fortune 50 Healthcare company on our customer stories page – that ends with the company breaking down organizational silos to save up to four weeks or 160 hours per project.
How AI-Powered Search on the Intranet Breaks Down Organizational Silos
Almost 6 out of 10 knowledge workers said they spend 75 percent of their solving issues that have been solved before in a 2014 survey. They aren’t able to tap into the expertise of their colleagues and in-house expertise because there is not a platform that encourages knowledge sharing. Upgrading the intranet with an AI-powered search solution is the solution to your organization silos.
Because the AI understands employees’ intent and needs when searching for information, AI-powered search on the intranet presents relevant information in context and in the flow of work to your employees, so they can do more on their own with less effort. The technology connects the ecosystem of record, makes information findable & searchable from wherever it is located, and then continually learns and improves to ensure that best information is available to every person, every time. This enables every employee to share and consume knowledge, depending on their context, information needs, and access level.
As you add more employees, rather than investing more and more time into manual tuning, AI-powered search will automatically deliver the most relevant content to each employee. With an intranet infused with AI-powered search, you can expect more rapid collaboration to create faster new product development cycles, shorter time-to-market for new products and more successful new product launches.