Meet the Next GeNeratioN iNtraNet

NoweNterprise

what is the NoweNterprise?

The notion of a static enterprise is being redefined by today’s consumer experiences. Contemporary interactions, emerging technologies, and a new standard for internal and external user experiences are driving the future of day-to-day business. Research consistently demonstrates that we adopt technology that we enjoy, not only in our personal lives but also in our professional lives. The cross-section of aesthetics, personalization, and smart connected technologies – in a truly mobile format – is what Tahoe Partner’s vision for the NowEnterprise is all about.

The NowEnterprise is an effective approach to engage today’s workforce with productivity tools that go far deeper than just accessing information. We seek to deliver a collaborative platform that answers fundamental questions. How do I connect and build relationships with the people around me? How do I connect with the culture? How do I learn from others? How do I get it all done in a smarter way? Our concept of the NowEnterprise is to deliver an environment that matches the needs of today’s work force, facilitates adoption at the individual level, and ultimately results in productivity and innovation across the enterprise.

Tahoe Partners is reinventing the enterprise experience and delivering the new digital expectation through a combination of vision, strategy, design, and technology expertise to transform digital collaboration. Read on to learn more about the NowEnterprise.

Goodbye iNtraNetsay hello to the NoweNterprise

Visiting most corporate intranets could be likened to a trip to Dunkin Donuts. You get what you came for – great coffee and maybe a donut or bagel – and you leave. It gets the job done, but there is no reason to stay. Contrast that to Starbucks. You still get a great cup of coffee and a nice scone. But they also provide free wi-fi, comfortable chairs and tables, and a pleasant atmosphere. You feel more inclined to grab a seat, stay a while, and do a little work. Cross a few things off your to-do list. All of a sudden, it starts to become part of your new routine. It becomes part of a new expectation….

So what does this have to do with Intranets? When we work with our clients to conduct an Intranet redesign, one of the first things we always do is conduct a survey. Question #1 is always the same: “What reasons do you visit your corporate intranet?”

The top answer? The corporate phone directory and org chart. There’s your coffee.

The second most popular answer? HR Forms. There’s your donut.

Then they leave.

There is an even bigger problem with this scenario. Often, that information is out of date. So this is even worse than the Dunkin Donuts comparison. Your coffee is now served cold.

powerful. The mobile revolution has put smart phones and tablets in the hands of everyone in your workforce. This dramatically increases the ability to access information from anywhere at any time. Best practices for design have changed as a result. Swipe and tap is the new point and click and, yes, good design still needs to translate seamlessly to a PC. The advance of technologies like HTML5 and JS along with the proliferation of device-based apps has elevated user expectations for a much richer and more interactive digital experience. Finally, social technologies have radically changed how people engage with each other, collaborate, and keep up with information. Social is becoming embedded in our work.

Let’s get back to our survey.

Your donut is stale. Eventually, you go somewhere else. So how do you go about fixing these fundamental issues? It goes without saying that information must be updated. That is a given. But how do you create something that makes them not only want to come back, but also stay and do more?

To be fair, when many intranets launched, their capabilities were limited by the lack of some key technologies. That has changed dramatically. As a result, delivering a new version of your intranet that builds on what’s already in place is usually the absolute wrong thing to do. Adding new features to an under-adopted solution isn’t going to get it done. It’s time for an overhaul.

Now those key technologies not only exist, but also are quite

there are three mindsets that we consistently find when conducting the personas.I want to be highly productive person on a day-to-day basis. I need tools at my fingertips.

I have a career path that I am working on. I need information to foster that.

I want to enjoy my experience at work. I want this to be more than just a job to me.

So how can we build an enterprise experience that satisfies these mindsets?

Read on and join us as we follow some of these users on their NowEnterprise journeys.

Further down that list of questions, we ask…”what do you want from your intranet?” We generally find the responses are not only quite broad, but also differ by demographic. We find that the younger the workforce, the greater the expectations. They expect it in their personal lives and they bring that same expectation to the workplace.

So what is this New Expectation? It is an expectation to develop a relationship that is much deeper than just information. How do I connect and build relationships with the people around me? How do I connect with the culture? How do I foster my career? Oh, and I want to have fun doing it…

From here, we begin to create user personas. As we develop these, we see a very interesting thing happen. Universally,

the Future oF the KNowledGe

worKer

What does the next generation intranet look like for the typical information worker?

According to McKinsey research, knowledge workers spend more than half their workday on “interactions” – with customers, vendors, and other employees. These efforts are indispensable but sometimes difficult to measure. Unlike an assembly line, where efficiency is counted in speed and output, an information worker’s daily tasks tend to be more varied. Improved productivity is found incrementally, and sometimes found outside the office.

That is where the NowEnterprise stands out. It can revolutionize the day-to-day efforts of a knowledge worker, by making the most of their time and untethering them from their desks.

Status Quo

I arrive at work in the morning and spend first 45 minutes of the day sorting through emails.

With the NowEnterprise

I arrive at work in the morning and log in to the NowEnterprise. I find a list of critical tasks culled from open requests, calendar items, and the occasional email, and start tackling them in order of priority.

Status Quo

I use multiple tools to get my job done, but everything is separate. I spend a lot of unproductive time switching between applications and trying to find information.

With the NowEnterprise

All the tools and information I need are available right in the NowEnterprise. I can see my calendar, important tasks, social interactions, and complete my time sheet without jumping between applications.

The NowEnterprise offers unprecedented flexibility for information workers, while driving major improvements in individual efficiency – and that’s good for both employees and employers.

Status Quo

Most interactions are conducted through email – and sometimes things get lost in the shuffle.

With the NowEnterprise

Requests from customers and colleagues and items requiring my approval are seamlessly integrated into my “home base” – the NowEnterprise.

Status Quo

My kids have an afternoon dentist appointment. I take the afternoon off to pick them up from school and drive them, and kill time reading a People magazine in the waiting room.

With the NowEnterprise

With the NowEnterprise, I can work from anywhere. While the kids get their teeth cleaned, I am able to log on with my tablet and pick up right where I left off at my desk.

When workers are empowered to do their job effectively, they able to excel, and are more likely to stay with your company. Organizations at the forefront of the NowEnterprise will likely find themselves with a productive, highly satisfied workforce.

Career developMeNt &

MilleNNials

NoweNterprise For the Next GeNeratioN

What are Millennials looking for in their careers? Research shows they want to work for organizations that value innovation and foster creativity – where imagination and outside-the-box thinking are rewarded. Although they are actively seeking opportunities for career development, above all, they want the option to chart their own course.

Over the next 10 years, Millennials will come to make up more than three quarters of the workforce, yet many companies are not meeting this fundamental need – 75% of Millennials believe their organizations could do more to develop future leaders.

Meet Claire. A true Millennial, she doesn’t hesitate to change jobs in pursuit of advancement in her Supply Chain career. Now that she’s a Logistics Manager at an organization that shares her values, she’d like to stay put – here’s how the NowEnterprise helps her do that.

75% of Millennials believe their company

could do more to develop future leaders

With the NowEnterprise, Claire takes an active role in her career development, all managed through her personal career profile.

Each day, she reviews her feeds on her Careers Dashboard – think Twitter and Flipboard for the Enterprise. She follows several senior people within her company with skills similar to her own, as well as several external industry experts, incorporated into the NowEnterprise through blog posts and social media. In addition, she belongs to several career-related Groups, both internal and external, integrated into her Careers Dashboard through her LinkedIn profile.

As she peruses her feed, Claire sees a new event hosted by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals – a webinar on sustainability practices, a hot topic for Supply Chain professionals. She adds it to her Career Calendar, a self-managed training program that

seamlessly combines a company-provided training plan with online classes, conferences, and other opportunities for continuing education. Taking note of this emerging topic, she creates a new category on her virtual pinboard for sustainability. As she starts to gather related content, she can collect it all here – blog posts, articles by industry experts, internal documents, and more.

Later that day, someone else in the company posts a request for knowledge on sustainability. Quickly referring to her pinboard, she responds to the request with an article she found earlier that day. Observing that there is interest beyond her own team, she authors a POV on the subject, and posts it to her company’s corporate news under Emerging Trends. By the end of the day, the individual who posted the initial request for information has begun following her, as well as many other colleagues who read her article.

As she curates relevant content and fosters these valuable connections, Claire is able to take all of this along with her as she moves upwards through the organization. Leveraging the NowEnterprise to manage her career development, she is able to identify and advance her skills, all the while making herself more visible within the company.

As for Claire’s employer, they have realized improvements in the long-term performance of their workforce and in their ability to retain their top talent. Giving their employees the opportunity to direct their own career development – in a way that is highly visible and familiar to use – has been a win-win. The bottom line? They can better identify and reward top performers and internal experts. Engaged employees who feel that they are on a path to the next step in their career tend to do better work – and to stick around.

doN’t sweat the

aNNual review

As employees, we’ve all been there. It’s December (or June, or whenever performance reviews take place at your organization), and you’re scrambling to put together the self-input portion of your annual evaluation. You want it to accurately capture what you’ve been up to all year – receiving great feedback from clients and colleagues, pursuing career development goals, delivering world-class solutions. However, those results are not captured in any meaningful, organized way. This makes it difficult to gather and as a result, you’re stuck spending a day sifting through old emails and files instead of actually delivering that outstanding work.

For managers, this process is even more cumbersome. Instead of having crucial conversations with our employees about opportunities for growth and career development, we’re spending time reviewing minutiae and checking boxes. For those managers with multiple direct reports, this could take days. The bottom line – if you’re scrambling at the 11th hour to fill out a form, chances are it isn’t going to be all that effective.

It doesn’t have to be this way – the NowEnterprise turns managing people into a two-way exchange. Individual employees maintain an Employee Dashboard, where they

In addition, managing people with the NowEnterprise offers remarkable insight into some of the less tangible aspects of employee performance. It gives you unprecedented visibility into employee activity. You can see who is truly participating in the discussion – engaging with colleagues, sharing knowledge, and fostering a collaborative environment. As a manager, you are able to participate as well. With performance targets top of mind, you can share relevant content with your direct reports to help them accomplish these goals and

can track and share private updates specific to their performance goals and objectives. They can proactively manage their progress throughout the year. The goals are right there in front of them daily, and progress toward those goals is tracked on an ongoing basis. So instead of realizing that you are 5 posts short of your “author 20 blog posts” goal with a week to go in the review cycle, you have already exceeded it. Think: more performance management information, in fewer emails.

This is another piece of that puzzle.

With the NowEnterprise, performance management becomes an effective tool to boost engagement and retention by enabling real growth and career development opportunities. Let’s send the typical review the way of typewriters and the three martini lunch – besides, we prefer microbrews. It’s time to embrace the new standard of performance management.

advance their career development. So you can reward the strong performers and encourage the less active ones in real time – before it is too late.

It’s time to make the annual review into something valuable. Better management transparency means less time spent on the busywork of performance management, and improved productivity for both you and your employees. We know that engaged employees with a clear career path in place tend to perform better and to stay with their employer.

FiNd your wolF paCK

Collaborative sales & the NoweNterprise

For those in Sales, who are often on the road and out of the office, it’s easy to develop a lone wolf mentality. But as The Hangover taught us, we’re better off with our wolf pack. We’ve talked before about how the NowEnterprise fosters connectivity and collaboration, which is essential for knowledge workers, millennials, and more. This lifeline to the enterprise is even more critical when your ability to deliver a WIN often relies on tapping into the expertise of your colleagues and your company knowledge bases, particularly when you need to be able to work from anywhere. How does the NowEnterprise make the sales process more seamless and effective?

process – whether that is a colleague’s expertise or an accelerating application – saves time and money, and ultimately, increases your win percentage.

On the RoadThe NowEnterprise mobile experience is optimized for whatever device you’re working on, letting you work seamlessly across your phone, tablet, and laptop. On a plane or at your desk (for once), robust workflow features simplify the process of reviewing proposals and content, so you can keep the work moving forward wherever you happen to be.

During the SalePut simply, the NowEnterprise wows clients. An impressive mobile-first, touch and swipe design (that also translates well to a PC) makes an impact in client meetings. The NowEnterprise

Before the SaleRobust search features and intuitive navigation make it quick and easy to identify the right people to collaborate with and the right information to leverage. Searching by name or subject matter or using a sales specific Line of Business (LOB) application, you can view results by date, expertise, pricing variable and more. Perhaps the go-to expert on a particular detail of a proposal works on the warehouse floor. Equipping deskless workers with mobile devices, the NowEnterprise integrates them into the collaborative proposal process. In addition, past presentation content and LOB resources are searchable and accessible – so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with each new proposal.

Accelerating the process of finding a specific resource during the pre-sale

After the SaleWe’ve talked before about the New Expectation – so what is the new expectation for the Sales process? Like your employees, clients are looking for a remarkable experience. Inspiring proposals and leave-behind content help you stand out from the pack – and drive improved Sales conversions. Strengthening internal buy-in and transparency to opportunities and proposals helps to boost employee engagement. What’s more, empowering your sales team to effectively tap into these internal resources ultimately leads to increased productivity and sales efficiency – and that means lower SG&A costs. The bottom line? Run together, don’t be a pack of one; you’ll enjoy more sales, and more revenue.

also enables sales reps to leverage sophisticated “backend” information near real-time while in front of the prospect. This capability becomes a strategic advantage over competitors that are still taking orders and getting back with quotes. The historical quoting process necessitated by an inability to access centrally held critical pricing and availability information slows the process and frustrates customers. Driving a presentation with voice enabled interactions – i.e. next slide, Siri! – is unquestionably more impressive than a clicker. After the meeting, you can create customized client and prospect sites. Instead of emailing a PowerPoint presentation, your leave-behind is a customized microsite that not only includes the meeting documents but integrates outside content like LinkedIn profiles and relevant blog content.

projeCt MaNaGeMeNt

oN-tiMe aNd oN-budGet

As a project manager, productivity is essential – both my own and that of my team. But what that looks like depends on the day. It might be found in time saved by eliminating the usual flood of status update emails, or it could mean connecting with the right people at the right time, virtually or in person. This is one project manager’s story:

I manage a great group of smart, creative people, but like many large teams spread across multiple locations, working cohesively can be a challenge. Gathering everyone in a single location can be a logistical nightmare, and I hate an endless stream of mass emails. Recently, while walking back to my office after lunch, I ran into one of my team members. We started chatting, and our impromptu conversation evolved into something more closely resembling a meeting. With the NowEnterprise, it’s easy to capitalize on opportunities like this. I had my tablet with me, so I instantly created a new meeting and tagged it with our project name. In a few clicks, I was able to book an available conference room and post a note to the team site’s social feed inviting any available project team members to come join us – onsite or through an online meeting.

“I don’t think of the NowEnterprise as an intranet anymore. It’s just my home base.”

stakeholders in a seamless workflow. The output of our impromptu meeting integrates painlessly into our project collaboration workspace. Everyone has access – without exchanging a single email.

I don’t think of the NowEnterprise as an intranet anymore, it’s just my home base for work. Since it launched, we are completing more projects on-time and on-budget. But what I value even more than the end result is how it helps our team members (me included) make better use of our time. Since we’re not searching for documents, exchanging emails, and bird-dogging approvals, we’re freed up to truly innovate and collaborate – which, after all, is the whole point.

The NowEnterprise is always running on my tablet, and it has become an integral part of my project management role. At this particular meeting, I asked a question outside the skill set of the group gathered in the room. Matching key words from my question with tags in social profiles, the NowEnterprise suggested a subject matter expert to consult and pulled her in for a quick video chat, giving us an instant answer and eliminating the need for additional offline work.

What about those who weren’t able to join us for an unscheduled meeting – how do we keep them in the loop? Through the NowEnterprise, I created an audio recording, automatically transcribing notes from the session and generating a list of follow-up tasks for me to approve and assign to team members and other

MilleNNials just waNt

to have FuN

You’ve probably heard the adage, “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” For a Millennial, that falls a little bit short. Not only do we want work to be fulfilling and rewarding, we also want it to be fun. And lest I perpetuate the misconception that Millennials are terrible – here’s why that’s a good thing. Creating a work experience that is fun and meaningful is less about entitlement and more about engagement, and that benefits employees of every age. With the NowEnterprise as the next generation Intranet, it’s possible to meet the needs of the next generation workforce and their desire to make work valuable, satisfying, and, oh yeah – fun.

As productivity tools make it possible to work anytime, from anywhere, the line between nine-to-five and five-to-nine is increasingly blurred. If I check-in at my favorite coffee shop while I’m working there, why not check-in at an office hotspot? I want the bragging rights that come with being mayor of the North Conference Room! If Google+ recognizes faces from my circles when I upload pictures, then it only makes sense that the NowEnterprise can identify

As productivity tools make it possible to work anytime, from anywhere, the line between nine-to-five and five-to-nine is increasingly blurred.

the awkward introductions, we were able to hit the ground running. Those few minutes invested in debating “Born to Run” versus “Darkness on the Edge of Town” were returned many times over.

To reach your employees now and in the future, it’s essential to make work gratifying and enriching. As Millennials make up a larger percentage of the workforce, we won’t be talking about fun features as a ‘nice to have’, but as necessary tools for engagement. Because while Millennials do want to have fun, they also expect an enterprise experience that is collaborative, exciting, and meaningful – in other words, the NowEnterprise.

and tag colleagues when I add photos from our corporate volunteer day. Activity motivators like gamification and social networking make work enjoyable, but more importantly, they can be powerful tools for encouraging participation and driving adoption.

Further, if your ultimate goal is to foster critical workplace connections that deliver productivity and bottom-line results, real collaboration isn’t only about sharing expertise and documents. As a die-hard Springsteen fan, one of my first actions within the NowEnterprise was to join the “Jungleland” interest group – the only place where one can “Bruuuuuuuce” with impunity. This interest group provided an introduction to colleagues I never would have encountered in the course of my day-to-day work. When I was placed on a project team with a fellow fan, we had already established a rapport. Skipping

Find out what we’ve learned in developing the NowEnterprise - like how we tackled three major challenges to create a mobile-friendly, enjoyable experience that makes people more productive at work.

How we got there >

obstaCles oN the road to the NoweNterprise

It’s not just an idea. The NowEnterprise is very real and it’s a game-changer.

Take a tour of the NowEnterprise, guided by the creative minds behind it.

What’s Next >

preview theNoweNterprise

BUILDING THE NEXT GENERATION INTRANET

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