In these unusually volatile times, the corporate intranet plays an essential role in communicating timely information to a workforce faced with collaborating and working remotely more than ever before. As employees around the world log in to work from their homes (cue the kid noises), the enterprise intranet enables rapid dissemination of corporate communications.

Employees need the reassurance of being able to reach out to their IT and HR organizations to request services and get timely information. This is where we see a great opportunity for organizations to go beyond an information dumping ground and to invest in leveraging ServiceNow, the industry leading enterprise platform as a service, to build an intranet that truly empowers the digital workplace experience. 

I’d like to offer a few thoughts about why ServiceNow offers significant advantages over traditional approaches to the corporate intranet. And, let’s face it, virtual workforces need all of the advantages they can get.

Effective Communication

Let’s start with the basics: getting information out there. The traditional intranet is often the default home page each and every time an employee opens a browser tab. That’s great, but what if the information they see every time isn’t relevant or even current? A ServiceNow based intranet overcomes this problem with methods to target content more effectively. Using campaigns, content delivery, and user criteria features, you can get the right information to the right audience at the right time. 

The adaptive, personalized pages you can build with Service Portal have far more impact and benefit than the static, generic pages you get with a traditional intranet. We’ve met with several companies who have spun up Covid-19 information sites. These are useful, but many of them present the same information to everyone. With ServiceNow, you have the opportunity to quickly tailor that information based on the employees’ location and role. 

Coordinated Engagement

But why stop at just broadcasting information? What if you could make the content more engaging? Keep in mind that engagement isn’t just about making the information more interesting to consume. It’s about using the information as a springboard for coordinated action. With ServiceNow, you have an opportunity for your content to do that. At its core, ServiceNow coordinates processes. Rather than taking the traditional intranet approach and having employees simply click a link from the content to continue some process in another tool, use the power of ServiceNow to create content employees can act on within the context of the same page to get more information, take action, engage others, and complete a task. For example, those same Covid-19 information sites could combine basic information with catalog items relevant to conferencing systems as well as community forums for employees to share experiences and recommendations. That smooth transition from consumption to engagement to coordination sets ServiceNow apart.

Extensible Platform

Many traditional intranet platforms suffer from rigor mortis. They just aren’t built for extensibility and remain rigid, waiting for their creator to enliven them with a new feature. This is definitely not the case for ServiceNow. Built as an extensible platform, ServiceNow, and particularly Service Portal, can adapt to new requirements easily. The interface that you create and surface on the intranet can be energized by business rules, security, integrations and workflow like any other ServiceNow application. Need a trading application to help employees deal with toilet paper shortages? Build it in record time on ServiceNow. When the crisis is over, transform it into an engaging marketplace for employees to trade far less critical but far more fun things like vintage records (you know the ones that were great at drowning out the family noises while working from home but remind you too much of when you had to work from home).

A change in perspective is perhaps the biggest change this global crisis will force upon us. Fortunately, it is with a different perspective that we discover the best solutions. I encourage you to take a moment and consider how combining ServiceNow’s unique offerings channeled through the powerful capabilities and flexibility of the Service Portal can create a more engaging and empowering intranet experience. An experience that will carry you through the worst of times and the best of times.

For more information or to set up a consultation about intranet solutions using ServiceNow, visit our website.