Reinventing the enterprise intranet with Trianz Pulse

Many businesses use a combination of internet and intranet functionality to perform their operations. The internet typically facilitates service delivery to external customers, and customer support via email, social, or voice over internet protocol channels.

The intranet has traditionally been for employees, enabling mostly a one-way conversation from leadership to employees. But prompted in part by our new virtual work relationships, intranets are blossoming into interactive communications networks where staff can find policies or documentation, share news updates, collaborate on projects, and comment or discuss topics in a forum.

It’s not stopping there. Just as the office was a physical gathering place for both teams and clients, intranets and extranets have become a digital workspace for employees, clients, franchisees, and other stakeholders.

Meanwhile, sadly, most businesses’ aging infrastructure for digital connectivity and collaboration is failing to deliver value.

Reasons why intranet platforms fail

A well-constructed intranet platform can greatly benefit employees and the wider business. Most enterprises, however, struggle to find and create an intranet platform aligned with their business needs. The issues boil down to:

Stagnant intranet evolution
Technology is constantly evolving, but intranet solutions have remained relatively stagnant. The intention with an intranet is to enable faster access to information and documentation, as well as to streamline employee-to-employee communications. This is only possible when the intranet solution is architected, managed, and governed well.

Intranet management is a technical skill that most laypersons lack, with such workloads being left to the IT department. Intranet success is highly dependent on engagement – and IT specializes in managing technology, not workforce relationships. Intranets should ideally be managed by the internal communications team, but a lack of resourcing, accessibility, or technical expertise can prevent them from doing so.

Inefficient processes and ineffective features
Around 90% of intranet solutions fail to deliver meaningful benefits, per research. The primary reasons are a lack of governance, a lack of purpose, and a lack of engagement from stakeholders in terms of business processes. As for features, a bad user experience (UX), and outdated or irrelevant content leaves employees frustrated and unwilling to use the service as it offers them little-to-no benefit.

The de-facto standard for intranet platforms was once Microsoft SharePoint. Most companies operated on Windows Server and Microsoft Office inside the Microsoft ecosystem, and SharePoint was included as part of the package.

Managing a SharePoint site requires technical knowledge, however, such as with Active Directory for permissions or governance management. Furthermore, complex and feature-rich SharePoint intranet sites need development staff with competencies in .NET, C#, HTML, and CSS coding.

Enterprises need a simpler way to manage their intranet services, with low- or no-code development and administration, seamless integration with third-party tools, and native social networking functionality to improve communications.

Introducing Trianz Pulse: simple yet sophisticated intranet

Trianz recognized the demand for a simple yet sophisticated intranet platform. The result is Trianz Pulse, a next-generation intranet platform designed to simplify intranet development or deployment for internal communications, while delivering industry-leading functionality and integration support to simplify the workday for employees.

Trianz Pulse fully transforms existing digital workspaces without diverging from the tried-and-tested intranet approach. It is also highly successful at connecting non-employee stakeholders such as franchisees or B2B clients.

Employee experiences and engagement
Pulse streamlines the employee experience in a number of ways. Employees can access improved HR services across payroll, benefits, performance management, and career progression. Similarly, stakeholders can engage with their employees through Pulse to centralize workforce management and increase engagement.

Direct access to learning and development resources within the Pulse dashboard also serves to increase employee work ownership, and drive upskilling across the workforce.

Data-driven insight through analytics
Trianz Pulse is based on the Microsoft 365 and Azure ecosystem, enabling access to advanced analytics functionality. Enterprises can access any services included in their Microsoft 365 or Azure subscription. This includes solutions like Microsoft Workplace Insights, Yammer Group Insights, and Microsoft Teams Analytics.

Pulse integrates and enables access to these solutions behind an obfuscation layer, simplifying management for non-technical users using a graphical user interface (GUI) and no-code paradigms. This enables all staff to perform analytics, visualize datasets, and access department-specific insights through the Pulse dashboard.

Broad integration support
An intranet solution should accommodate all software tools used by the business. Pulse offers broad support for third-party independent software vendor (ISV) tools, including Zoom, ServiceNow, Slack, Routematic, Dropbox, Looker, Tableau, and Salesforce, to name a few. Enterprises can also opt for Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, PowerBI, Yammer, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Outlook to leverage native tools in the Microsoft/Azure ecosystem.

Super-app and flexible digital platform
Designed as a highly adaptable and intuitive communication and collaboration platform, Pulse has also been tapped by global entities needing to stay connected to clients, partners, suppliers, franchisees, and more. There is virtually no limit to the combination of productivity apps, collaboration platforms, enterprise analytics, social media and managerial tools that can fit into this one digital platform.

Driving digital transformation success

Only around 7% of companies across industries understand the true definition of digital transformation: that is, reimagining the value proposition to stakeholders, employees, and customers.

Pulse reimagines the intranet value proposition for employees, thus improving the employee experience (EX). This is vital as more people begin working from home. Disjointed communications, cluttered documentation libraries, and non-integrated systems and applications anchor businesses and reduce agility and growth potential.

Trianz’ Pulse changes that by enabling seamless software integrations, advanced analytics capabilities, centralized and governable data or documentation storage, and multi-channel communications – all while giving stakeholders full control.