6 Microsoft MVPs Share What's to Come in 2022 and Beyond as Microsoft Matches Technology to a Changing World

The workplace as we know continues to evolve with much of that change driven by technology.
Companies planning for 2022 and beyond can shape their priorities and budgets with a deeper focus on technology, thanks to some insights from Microsoft MVPs.


The best way to spend your technology dollars

When it comes to budgeting, understanding what's happening in organizations similar to yours and in the industry—particularly what is working and what isn’t—is helpful. Likewise, taking a closer look at how other organizations solve their IT challenges can help your company look ahead and prepare for technology challenges and opportunities in 2022.

Both the biggest and smallest organizations worldwide use Microsoft technology, so we convened a panel of 6 Microsoft MVPs from Canada, the United States, and the UK to discover tips and strategies for the Microsoft ecosystem.

Microsoft MVPs work with hundreds of customers across the globe, including some of the biggest names in the business. Through this exposure, MVPs gain a wealth of practical insights.

Our panel provided honest feedback about what's working and what needs improvement in Microsoft 365 Office Apps & Services. This feedback can help your organization:

• Get the scoop on what other organizations are doing today and planning for tomorrow

• Expand awareness of industry trends

• Prepare by knowing what's likely to come next

In particular, our MVP panelists said organizations today need:

• Better change management and better adoption

• Improved user experience

• Solid governance and compliance

• Better integration

• More opportunities for Microsoft Partners

Better change management and better adoption

Earlier this year, ORIGAMI conducted a study with a random sample of IT leaders from North America and Europe. When asked about their chief concerns, these leaders agreed with the Microsoft MVPs that technology adoption and change management top the list.

We took a closer look to determine why this is such a critical issue for organizations of all sizes.

Top concerns of IT leaders

Adoption is amongst the highest concerns for IT leaders.

Marc D. Anderson, Office Services and Apps MVP, sheds some light. Marc runs a consulting company called Sympraxis Consulting with an elite team of consultants specializing in building intranets, migrating to SharePoint Online, and reorganizing existing SharePoint tenants.

He says that:

"The level of enhancements from Microsoft is so fast right now that it's almost impossible to keep up!"

Marc added that he would like to see better communication about changes to the platform.

The fast pace of changes is not exclusive to professionals; in fact, end-users struggle the most when it comes to these constant changes.

Frequent changes require more training and support, and that's what Asif Rehmani's company VisualSP specializes in. Here is how Asif describes the situation:

"Our clients at VisualSP are interested in making sure that they are getting good ROI from their enterprise application investments. The only way to ensure good ROI is to make sure that there is the effective use of these applications by the users."

Asif feels many of his customer's Gen Z employees are used to lighter applications that work wherever they are without downloading a desktop application. He predicts that Microsoft, over time, will enhance the functionality of its Office and Teams web apps so that they no longer require downloading a bulky desktop app.

From the IT perspective, not having to maintain a desktop app and having users access what they need right from the browser is also a great benefit. However, many organizations are struggling with providing this experience due to security and compliance reasons. For now, Asif's company tries to reduce the friction by providing great contextual help experiences to users to enhance the adoption of many enterprise web applications.

Clearly, better adoption is directly tied to user experience.

Improved user experience

User experience touches many areas and is closely related to integrated employee experience, where all applications work together to support user flow.

Cindy Lewis specializes in Microsoft Project/Project Online and Project Management training for her customers through her business 4 Pillars of Success®. She shared a story that sheds some light on how user experience impacts employees:

"Clients continue to demonstrate to me that even though they have access to a complex set of features, they often just need the basic features to run the business. For example, multi-national companies are running major projects with Microsoft Planner and Project for the Web. They may not need a more complex solution such as Project Online or Project Desktop client. Clients often tell me they really want a nice interface."

This story confirms the experience that Asif mentioned earlier. Likewise, our own research from this summer concurs that IT leaders are concerned about employees thinking their corporate systems being too hard to use, which negatively affects adoption.

How do you know you have an adoption problem?

Leaders fear that users will feel that the system is difficult to use and abandon using it.

However, having too many smaller tools can also create confusion.

If tools are becoming more granular, then there will be more of them to choose from. The more users can choose their tool, the more data might live in more places, even if they are all on the Microsoft platform.

This abundance of available tools raises the question from users,
"I have all these tools. What do I use when?"

It also sparks concern about the governance from IT and compliance teams who wonder:
"Our data lives in 100 different places. How do we ensure compliance?"

Fortunately, one of our MVP panellists focuses almost exclusively on compliance and has insight on this topic.

Solid governance and compliance

Joanne C. Klein is an independent consultant and her work centers around ensuring compliance for organizations.

Here is the shift Joanne is seeing:

"Although many of my past engagements were focused on road-mapping the compliance journey for an organization, the focus has now shifted to implementing real controls [...]. I believe this is due to increased pressure from regulators. I work with both compliance professionals—Privacy, Security, Records Managers, HR, Legal, Risk—as well as IT technical professionals and I often find myself ‘bridging the gap’ between these two disciplines. It's fascinating to see these two areas come together – a necessary requirement for success."

Joanne believes Microsoft will make more progress in the security and compliance controls extending across the modern workplace tools users engage with today. She adds that organizations face tremendous pressure not only from regulators but also from customers, partners, and employees to ensure they're meeting their obligations, particularly in the data privacy space.

Joanne is predicting that this will call for more automated tools, reporting, and auditing to support their efforts.

Better integration

This summer, we asked our own study participants to name their top 4 technology needs, and 56% of them called out "integration with work apps."

Top features called out by IT leaders

Integration with other work apps is the top priority amongst IT leaders.

Not surprisingly, users find it hard and unnecessary to log into several work applications. They want things to be available right there and then. IT leaders also say that they don't want to pay for separate applications to allow users to complete their workflow or simply view a report.

Cindy Lewis tells us another interesting story that shows how users' experience is closely tied to integrating applications to support employees' flow of work.

"Every client I work with tells me that no matter what role they are in, they have to make reports for their boss or executive leadership. All programs have features and reports built in, but I still hear that some things are too complex or hard to find for the average worker,” she said. “While I often share solutions available in Power Automate and Power BI, users often feel they should not need to go elsewhere."

Joanne C. Klein agrees that one of the things she'd like to see improved is

"Anything and everything to make it easier for an end-user to be compliant without interrupting their workflow."

Microsoft's modern experience in SharePoint has made integration much easier, but there are many legacy customers who still use the "classic" experience. Will "classic" go away with so many enterprise and on-prem customers still using it? That's what Marc D. Anderson wants to know.

Microsoft is indeed focusing a great deal more on the cloud, and Asif Rehmani predicts that in 2022, the ecosystem for Microsoft 365 will grow to include business applications in Dynamics 365. He adds that Microsoft 365 services will become a one-stop-shop for collaboration, communication, business services, and everything in between.

In Asif's opinion, Microsoft Teams will continue to gain momentum and will become even more mainstream with users around the world. He's not the only one putting bets on MS Teams.

Lesley Crook, Office Apps and Services MVP at UK company CloudWay, primarily works on adoption and change management for her customers. Lesley predicts that MS Teams will see more integration into employees' flow of work, including Mesh avatars for MS Teams meetings for those bad hair days! To that end, it is hard not to mention Viva. The new kid on the block, Viva has many of our own customers wondering where it fits with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem. Lesley also thinks that Viva could benefit from its modules connecting better together, including Ally.io—the fifth module just added to Viva. This new module promises to align people’s work with team goals and company mission giving employees more clarity and purpose on the work they are doing, Lesley shares more on her new blog.

With so many integrations being called out, it's only natural to turn to Microsoft partners for help.

More opportunities for Microsoft Partners

MVPs often collaborate closely with the Microsoft product team while working independently or within other organizations.

Christian Buckley, Office Apps & Services MVP and Microsoft Regional Director, manages the global alliance between Microsoft and AvePoint, a renowned Microsoft partner, and says that he is excited about the expanded focus on improving the employee experience with the Microsoft Viva offerings and associated features, and he is

"Mostly interested in seeing the Viva APIs opened up to ISV partners so that partners can develop solutions against the 4 (soon to be 5) Viva solutions."

Availability of advanced integrations such as APIs naturally require a mature, well-adopted application. Developing APIs before wide user adoption is simply illogical, so adoption is a prerequisite to advanced integrations. With new tools like Viva, it might take a while for a wide array of APIs to be accessible.

In essence, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Adoption can impact partners' ability to integrate, and partners' appetite to build integrations may depend on wider customer adoption.

Christian remains optimistic, and he predicts that

"We're going to see deeper integrations and user experiences around the fluid framework (Microsoft Loop components) that will fill some of the major gaps we have with multi-tenancy, task management, and external collaboration scenarios."

Microsoft Loop, just announced in November 2021, might require more than a simple set of APIs. Unlike MS Teams, Loop has workspaces and pages that appear to store data. If Microsoft wants to expedite the adoption of Loop, it might need to enable vendors to migrate from existing non-Microsoft equivalents to Loop.

The bottom line

Microsoft's new product announcements show that the company is committed to improving the user experience and giving its customers better choices. There are opportunities for better integration in 2022 and beyond. For partners to take on integration, they will need help from Microsoft in providing necessary product APIs and roadmaps. It may be too early for some new products, but partners remain optimistic. Ultimately, Microsoft MVPs see a lot of potential and promise in the year to come.

What are your predictions?

Do you see the trends our MVP panel is sharing in your company?
Care to share your thoughts?
Everyone would love to hear your thoughts in a specific context, so please, add them in the comments below.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Digital Workplace Advisor at ORIGAMI. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.

Origami Connect Research: The State of Digital Employee Experience in 2021

Why did we study digital employee experience

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, allowing more employees to work from the comfort of their homes. But when it comes to technology, how much “comfort” has remote work brought? Our research reveals that many companies are still unprepared for remote work. But for those who do, what separates businesses that provide superior technology experience to their employees?

To understand what makes a business a digital employee experience (DEX) leader, Origami surveyed 200 employees from North America, Europe, and Oceania. The results suggest that DEX leaders are more likely to track technology experience metrics and collaborate with other departments on a software selection. Those activities in turn lead to better leadership support and more resources to improve, manage and maintain a digital workplace.

With remote work here to stay, securing resources for digital experience initiatives is crucial to keeping employees engaged and retaining top talent. The responses to the survey point to a gap in tech management practices that might affect the leadership buy-in. Businesses that don’t measure technology ease-of-use and don’t involve other stakeholders in the software selection conversation might hurt their chances of getting C-Suite support.

How was the study conducted

Our insights are based on a random sample of 200 employees from different companies who self-identified as leaders and individual contributors at these organizations. The respondents were in some way a part of an active intranet improvement project in 2021. The majority of them come from IT (23%), HR (23%) and Internal comms (15%), with (45.5%) representing 100-1000 employee-size companies.

The survey included a series of 14-17 questions with responses collected via an online form. The responses were split into segments, including company size and the respondent job role. These segments allowed Origami to get a more accurate picture specific to organization size.

Top Findings

While companies across the globe have had more than 18 months to ramp up remote work capabilities, many organizations are still woefully unprepared for remote work. Three key challenges—remote access technology, lack of documented policies and procedures, and nonexistent performance management.

To make the best out of remote work tools, companies should make more improvements to their digital employee experience. As of now, only the minority of SMBs and Mid-market is focusing on workplace tech experience. We called them “DEX Leaders”. DEX leaders are the companies that rated the quality of their workplace tech as “high”. The survey defined digital employee experience as “High” if it is consistently revisited and improved or key improvements to the workplace tech are underway.

Now, the question is what do DEX Leaders do differently?

As it turned out, they are more likely to track their technology ease-of-use and share improvements with the leadership team on a regular basis. This might give them an edge when presenting a business case to their leadership or stakeholders. As a result, they are more likely to get their budget approved.

They are also more collaborative during software selection.

Workplace tech leaders are more likely to have IT working with other departments on a software selection. So, their software decisions are less likely to be made in silos. This approach might help them reach a consensus with stakeholders and knock software adoption rates out of the park post-launch.

What other businesses can learn from DEX Leaders?

Businesses will benefit from regularly tracking technology experience metrics such as ease of use. Measuring technology ease of use will help to build a business case for workplace tech improvements and demonstrate the value of DEX initiatives.

Following DEX leaders will help businesses overcome the current leadership support gap. They will see more success with stakeholder consensus if they approach a technology initiative with a mindset of co-creation, starting with a software selection collaboration.

Our team is working on making these and many more findings available in a Downloadable PDF format.
Once a PDF is available, we’ll add a link here.

The Five Stages of Digital Employee Experience

What is Digital Employee Experience

Digital Employee Experience shows how well the workplace technology in your organization supports your employees.

The more technology the better the experience?

It doesn't mean that the more technology you have – the better your employees are supported.

Take a new employee onboarding, for example. If your new employee has to learn too many tools (some of which they might encounter only once in their job), they may see that as not intuitive and chaotic.

On the other hand, if technology options are too restrictive, employees might be less productive because their technology needs exceed available options.

So what is the sweet spot?
When does the Digital Employee Experience become just enough but not too complicated?

The answer lies in key factors affecting the development of your organization.

In other words, there are at least five factors that determine a stage of maturity in the organization.

Factors affecting Digital Employee Experience

Five factors that affect your Digital Employee Experience are:

• Business Needs: What's needed for an organization to be in business and stay productive

• People and Culture: How is talent acquired, trained, and retained

• Internal Communications: How does organization enable the flow of communication

• Technology: How well does technology help everyone in the organization

• Decision Making / Governance: how are decisions made within the organization

Stages of each of these factors

Each of these factors can be in one of the stages below:

• Ad-hoc: things are done haphazardly

• Emergent: initial processes emerge, but still much of the work is done manually

• Structured: processes are implemented for key parts of the business

• Evolving: processes are measured and maintained to ensure repeatability and efficiency

The stage in which your business needs are will set the requirements for stages for other factors (People and Culture, Internal Communications, Technology, and Decision Making / Governance).

For example, when an organization's business needs are in an Ad-hoc stage, it’s likely going to assess its needs reactively, and operate in a reactive way.

If that’s true for business needs, there is little use to upgrade the technology to stage 2. It may be met with resistance or ignored.

Example: How do these stages affect company’s Employee Experience

Let's look at this example.

Here is the example of the organization where Business needs are in stage 3, meaning this organization is structured and at least these elements are present:

• Key improvements to Employee Experience are underway

• Goals are high-level and written

• The requirements will solve the needs of several departments or teams

Here are other key stages this organization is in:

Although business needs for this organization are relatively mature (stage 3), their decision making and governance process is lagging in stage 2, meaning:

• Some people are interested in making improvements, but implication to the decision is not broadly understood

  • Problem: If improvements are not broadly understood, there will be little or no buy-in from the broader team. This will prevent the requirements to consider the needs of other departments – which is what's desired by the business need above.

• A manager from any department can make a decision alone without consulting others

  • Problem: This will preclude the organization from solving several departments or teams required by the business above.

• Several people from different departments will do the work

  • Problem: Since a single department might have made the decision, other department leaders may not buy into it, resulting in a fragmented Employee Experience.

The technology is also behind, in stage 2. At this stage, employees get access to basic technology:

• File storage and management software

• Essential work tools (email, messaging and job-specific applications)

• Basic Tech support & helpdesk

• Possible SharePoint sites for collaboration

• Potential IT Manager overseeing technology

Naturally, for this organization to deliver to business needs for stage 3, all of the other factors (HR, Internal Comms, and Decision Making/Governance) also need to pick up and move from their lagging stages to stage 3.

In other words, here is where these key factors need to move.

Aligning your Digital Employee Experience with business needs

Overly engineered technology

In contrast, if the organization is trying to provide technology for stage 4, while business needs are not mature enough for this stage, such an organization will end up with an expensive, grandiose vision and no one to use the technology.

For example, a start-up operating in ad-hoc mode may not need an intranet, a chatbot, and any other advanced technology to stay productive. This startup may just need a fileshare and an email system.

In this case, the organization needs to scale back its technology to match the business needs.
We’ll get into the details in just a minute.

Scaling back the technology to align with business needs

This misalignment is mainly due to a lack of understanding of the stage in which the organization is. This is where the next part comes in.

Quiz: What is the right intranet for your company culture?

Right about now, you might be wondering, what stage is my organization?

You take our anonymous 10 min quiz and find out which stage your organization is in now and how you can level up.

Here is a high-level breakdown of each stage; more details are addressed in the quiz.

Stage 1: Ad-hoc

Things are done haphazardly. As far as business needs are concerned:

• Employees use what they're given to do the job

• No clear goals to improve the employee experience

This leads to decision-making having no specific process when selecting a solution. The hope is that someone internal will do the work to improve things, but it's not their primary job. When asked for improvements, leadership is not interested or resistant to improving the employee experience because they too busy operationally.

From people and culture, employees are provided resources as they need them, performance reviews are inconsistent, and no formal talent acquisition, retention, or training processes exist.

As far as internal communications go, various email announcements are sent to all employees as needed, and no specific resources are dedicated to internal communication.

The technology mainly consists of file storage and management software and some essential work tools (email, messaging and job-specific applications). There is some form of basic tech support & helpdesk and no formal IT department.

Stage 2: Emergent

Initial processes emerge, but still, much of the work is done manually.

Business needs are often shaped by:

• Leaders asking and taking steps to improve Employee Experience

• Goals are socialized but not written

• The requirements will solve the needs of one specific department or a team

This often results in some people being interested in making improvements, but the issue is not broadly understood. Decisions are made in silos, where a manager from any department can make a decision alone; as a result, there is no clear understanding of who from which department will do the work.

As far as culture is concerned, employees have access to track performance, and some initial documented policies and procedures exist. HR starts to manage talent acquisition and retention for key resources.

With a growing focus on employee needs, some people are assigned to internal communication, but it's not their primary job. A regular employee newsletter sent to all employees is the primary vehicle for all company communication.

IT now has a dedicated IT Manager basic tools an ad-hoc organization has. In some cases, SharePoint sites are starting to be used primarily for document management and for collaboration.

Stage 3: Structured

Processes are implemented for key parts of the business. Strategy starts to shape how the organization works, and the business begins to see that:

• Critical improvements to Employee Experience are needed and underway

• Goals are high-level and written

• The requirements will solve the needs of several departments or teams, not just a siloed team

Decisions are more streamlined; for example, IT starts to work with the department(s) to make a decision that will benefit the longer-term strategy. Organization starts hiring people to implement the strategy. HR teams add employee self-evaluation and career growth programs.

Some leaders view improving employee experience as a strategic priority, but some skeptical leaders aren't convinced.

A regular employee newsletter is sent to all employees, and in more advanced cases, when the intranet is available, Internal Communication is posted on the intranet. Someone specif is assigned to internal communication, and it's their primary job.

IT plays a big role in organizational transformation. HR systems for performance and career management are being implemented. Remote access becomes available. Company Intranet is being implemented, and senior IT leadership is established.

Stage 4: Evolving

Processes are measured and maintained to ensure repeatability and efficiency. This stage is not something you achieve once and keep, consistent work is required to keep it, and business knows it.

Business needs become focused on:

• Digital Employee Experience being consistently revisited and improved

• Goals are specific and written

• The requirements will solve the needs of the entire organization

The decisions become focused on the long term, so often, a business case is prepared and reviewed by executives who make a decision. Company leaders at the highest level view improving employee experience as a strategic priority. The organization understands that all that is not possible to achieve in-house alone, so external consultants work with internal resources to do the work.

HR is focused on establishing Learning & Development, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs.

To manage all of the initiatives efficiently, information is posted on the intranet, employees actively post comments on a company intranet, and a dedicated internal communications team is involved.

To support the initiatives, IT implements a learning management system. In larger organizations, internal Development or Engineering team is established. In more distributed workforce environments where many applications are involved, Enterprise Architects become part of the IT team.

What does it all mean?

Projects can fail or partially fail due to misaligned business and technology needs. Digital Employee Experience projects, like an intranet implementation, are no exception.

Take a quiz above to get an assessment on which stage you’re at and recommended steps to what kind of Digital Employee Experience is best suited for your needs.

Even if you’re clear which stage your organization is at and what it needs to evolve, have others self-assess where they think the organization is at. This will provide clarity to your team and set your project for success.

We offer a variety of consulting projects to help you assess and improve your Digital Workplace Experience. To speak with an expert book a free consultation.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Digital Workplace Advisor at ORIGAMI. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.

Why focusing on apps and widgets can really make your intranet fail?

Summary:
Focus on apps and widgets is quite common in many intranet projects but it doesn’t yield results that business users are after. Successful intranet is all about the content and helping users access this content in quick and intuitive way.

As you design your intranet, perform content audit to make your intranet centered around content relevant to your users. Have a good representation of stakeholders in your workshop. Treat each app as a helper to serve content scenarios and not take over the stage.

Finally think about the maintenance of your apps if you’re considering building custom ones.

It’s about the content

Let me be very clear about one thing:

Your users come to your intranet because they need content they think they can find there.

That’s it. Everything else is a bonus.

When we talk to users about the biggest issues they face with their intranets - issues related to content are at the very top of the list, the middle of the list, and at the end.

Hard to believe? You be the judge. Here is what we hear when we start a new project and do a content audit in a form of a test:

• “Actually quite hard to find things, some things are not obvious”

• “I found that I had no idea about where to find half of the things on the site“

• “The menu titles are really vague“

• “Some of the resources took a few attempts to find what I’m looking for“

What to do:

• Invest time in content audit.

  • Involve various content representatives in your workshop. They will be the authors of what’s going on the intranet, and they need to be there to tell you that.

• Group your content by a function and not department/ownership.

  • If I’m looking for a template, I expect to find it in “Templates“, I don’t expect to have to figure out who would be the author of that template and then check out the site of that department. This also solves issues with content owned by multiple departments.

• Include tools and apps that help finding information.

  • Focus on what users would look for not what you’d want them to look for.

  • Avoid generic roll ups such as “Recent Documents“, “Recently Updated Forms“. Ensure your forms are really the most popular before you start promoting them as such.

• Allow to provide feedback easily.

  • If this means putting “Page Contacts“ app on your page, make sure you also include FAQ section, so authors of the page can actually post those questions they get most often and reduce the burden of answering the same things multiple times.

Apps as ingredients

Does this mean you shouldn’t have any apps? No. Think of your apps as ingredients to an amazing dish, and that means:

• Adding everything can lead to surprises … often unpleasant ones

  • Just because you see an app on Office 365 “spice rack” think whether you add value by using it. Adding more apps to your pages just because they’re available will leave your users confused and lost.

• Think of your customers

  • Intranet is not a meal you will enjoy all on your own. You share it, so remember to accommodate other stakeholder’s needs. The best intranets are well balanced with needs of entire organization.

• Trust the recipe

  • It’s fine to improvise but be honest with yourself whether you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone. There is a recipe to a successful dish and there is a method to a successful intranet. Following proven methodology will save you time and money reworking the costly mistakes.

• Trust the experts

  • Watching a YouTube video on “what’s information architecture“ doesn’t mean you can fully put one together. It’s best to acknowledge that and get qualified help before everyone starts unfavorably judging your work.
    

What to do:

• Start with the content on sticky notes before you start building the site.

  • We often see this common mistake. People start adding pages and content without fully understanding what else is going in this area. You end up with disjoint site impossible to find anything on.

  • Build your content map on a pager using sticky notes or electronic boards. Refine, test it, and update it until it’s ready. Then you’re ready and can take to one level down and start creating sites and pages.

• Use apps that help you deliver needed content.

  • Apps are there just to simplify access to the information not create new information that is not needed. If your users don’t need a stock ticker on the home page - don’t add it.

Think about the maintenance

Every time you think about building an app think about its maintenance, and that includes

• Updates that keep it running as Office 365 changes over time

• Performance.

• Compatibility with evolving dependencies such as services.

• Troubleshooting.

• Data retention.

What to do:

• Determine whether you need a custom app to serve up your specific content.

• Does the app have an owner and optionally a contributor?

• Determine who will maintain and troubleshooting the app.

• Does the app require content moderation, is there an owner for that?

• If the app has critical information, what’s the fallback plan?

• Is the app compatible with the Office 365 platform in a foreseeable future or does it use approach and modules that are becoming obsolete?

  • What about app performance?

• Does the app have consistent user experience with the rest of the site?

As you design your intranet, you will come across various alternatives, chose options which are driven by users’ demand. Ensure the demand is real and well represented and your intranet is set for success.

We’re here to help

If you have questions on how to make your intranet more engaging while leveraging your existing Office 365 and SharePoint investment, we’re here to help you make that impact.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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Where does Intranet fit in Your Digital Workplace Strategy

Summary:
Your Digital Workplace is not a single tool. It’s a set of tools that make work possible by complimenting each other. By evaluating new tools that come on the market in terms of their fitness on your roadmap, you can avoid tools that are roadmap-distractions and require costly backtracking. Intranets have some very clear goals and purpose in comparison to other communication tools, but you have to ensure governance and adequate support in order to make the investment worthwhile.

1. Digital Workplace: Understanding

A bit more than a year ago, at Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando, I had a chance to speak with Joe Francis who runs a Yammer network for over 200,000 users at Glaxo Smith Kline.

Joe and their MS Partner Leslie provided some real close-up looks on how they manage their Yammer network and how it has transformed communication within their organization.

At the time, Yammer was known in the Microsoft community to be on the “decline“. I spoke with several SME’s in the area and everyone had a nervous feeling what’s going to happen with the product. And yet it does so well at GSK.

Just 5 years ago, Yammer was considered a disruptor and many claimed it will displace SharePoint as a communication tool. But it didn’t. Now, similar disruptor stories are told about Microsoft Teams.

Many organizations are struggling to figure out how Microsoft Teams and other tools in Office 365 suite will fit their digital landscapes.

How do you know when a new tool is right for the organization?

First, let’s understand what a Digital Workplace is:

A Digital Workplace is a cohesive set of tools and environments which help the company operate successfully and drive towards a business goal.

Few key characteristics:

• Each tool must have its purpose and audience in your organization

  • For example: you’re not trying to do project management with Yammer, just as you wouldn’t use Microsoft Project for employee communication

• There is a governance around each tool and business users are not confused

  • Users are not mistakenly putting confidential files onto an externally accessible network

• The tool belongs to a roadmap

  • It’s not a rogue tool installed out of someone’s impatience. Even if it’s an ad-hoc solution, it needs to have a roadmap and transition plan

2. Is the Tool a Distraction or does it belong to a roadmap?

Now that we know what the Digital Workplace is and that it can have several tools in its arsenal, let’s define the “distraction” on a roadmap.

The Roadmap

Your roadmap is a way to go from point A (now) to point B (say, 3 years from now).

A tool that is a distraction will take you on a side road and lead nowhere so you’ll have to backtrack to get back on the right path.

There are a few characteristics of a digital tool that make it a distraction.

Tool is a distraction if

• It’s a short term “band-aid”; not tied to solving a business goal for the company

  • Example: A team needs to collaborate with a contractor who doesn’t have a corporate account, so they create a Dropbox account for them to share files with.

    • This action does not create a strategy for sharing files externally, it’s simply a band-aid for this one case

• It doesn’t fit core values or policies of the business

  • Example: Help-desk team using email to ask customer for passwords

    • This action can result in breaches and customer information leaks

• It doesn’t scale with growing demand

  • Example: Using Microsoft Teams channels to store project documentation

    • This decision might make sense temporarily but as more projects you’re assigned to, the more channels you’ll have and searching, archiving, and accessing relevant deliverables will become a nightmare as the team grows

• It has visible negative impact on business goals

  • Example: Email blast company news

    • This clogs people’s email. They stop paying attention to newsletters and miss important announcements resulting in disengagement

3. Where does the intranet fit into all this?

Intranet revolves around these key goals:

1. Be a hub for reliable corporate communication (leadership communication, KPIs etc)

2. Be a one-stop-shop for corporate knowledge (templates, samples, Knowledgebase, How to’s)

3. Be a central spot for resources that employees need to get their job done (manuals, policies, request forms)

4. Be a one-stop-shop for collaboration (including: document management, findings skills and expertise through directories, launching key forms such as HR forms)

Additionally, if you don’t have any overlapping tools such as HRMS systems, your intranet can also be a place for:

• Employees to connect (employee news, events, and ideas contributions)

• Staff Engagement (shout-outs and kudos)

4. Setting up your intranet for success

As Joe mentions in his interview about Yammer, you have to plan for success.

Here are the key steps to implement your intranet successfully:

Solutions

• Obtain Executive buy-in

  • Propose a pilot project. Set targets, measure outcomes, report results

• Avoid the trap of Planned Obsolescence

  • Planned Obsolescence has several shades, here are few examples

    • Example 1: Instead of maintaining the service subscription companies do not renew it hoping the software will just work. Instead, the software becomes stale and users become dissatisfied with its performance

    • Example 2: No budget assigned for an internal resource to collect employee requests, prioritize, and action them

    • Example 3: No budget for increased demand on helpdesk resources when rolling out a new software

• Equally represented content

  • Content on the intranet is often heavily tilted towards communications with very little representation for the areas of the business. This reduces your audience and engagement.

• Build intuitive information architecture

  • Not being able to find things on the intranet is one of the most common frustrations that users report

  • Reorganize your intranet information architecture

  • Test efficiency of your information architecture

  • Lock down major areas

• Target your communication

  • Split news into global and targeted. Separate people news/watercooler from company news. Separate company-wide alerts (ex.: outage alerts) from news

• Launch and Post launch activities

  • 34 Intranet Launch Ideas for the Best Adoption Results

We’re here to help

Struggling to understand how Office 365 toolset fits the digital landscape in your organization?
It’s not always simple, and requires expertise to help you gain insight in the roadmap Microsoft has for its products. We’re here to help you.
We’d be happy to help you with a transparent and objective consultation to get you on the right track and maximize your existing Office 365 investment.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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