A Checklist for a Modern Core Digital Workplace and/or Intranet

One of the most challenging questions to answer about digital employee experience today is where the center of gravity for it lies. As in, where does the worker, by default, spend most of their time using it. The answer used to be that the worker themselves determines it, often with specific guidance or training, by figuring out how to apply the devices, applications, tools, and platforms to which they are given access, to their daily job. This self-guidance generally defines the typical digital workplace journey even today, and constitutes the sort of benign neglect, throw-it-over-the-wall situation that we current find in many organizations.

Knowing where the center of gravity should actually be has become important lately for several strategic reasons. First, it’s very useful in identifying where digital workplace teams should spend the majority of their design and analytics time so they can ensure what they provide works well and is optimized for the purposes to which its currently being used. Second, because the digital employee experience has become so fragmented and siloed that just finding and navigating apps, data/docs, channels, and experiences has become its own significant overhead, it allows us to identify where we should be integrating said side journeys into a common hub.

Finally, it just gives us a better operating lens to the digital life of the employee and the business: We can see how to better situate IT within the broader worker journey to produce the best outcomes, onboarding and cross training becomes simplified through a more standardized user experience and thus faster/easier, which means satisfaction and retention becomes higher, adoption/effectiveness of digital workplace investments is greater, and so on. Why? Because this lens provides a more systematic and overarching view that aims at overall stakeholder needs better. It also avoids the traditional point solution myopia that makes it hard to see the big picture or understand properly how an IT system actually contributes to the business (a surprisingly thorny problem.)

A number of virtual “places” have come and (largely) gone over the years that attempt to partially address the center of gravity issue. That’s because of the significant payoff in doing so compared to focusing on less traveled — off dramatically less, areas of the digital workplace (see: SharePoint team site graveyards, largely abandoned intranets, and almost useless search engines.) There’s also a lot of edge IT to sort through: The average large enterprise has, to the surprise of most I find, between 1,000 and 3,000 applications that run the business.

But in my experience over the last couple of decades, although the number of apps keeps growing substantially, most employees only use a small subset on a regular basis, usually a foundational set that almost every employees uses, then a different set of apps based on their work persona.

Currently, my rule of thumbs is that core employee experience can be addressed by putting the hundred or so core apps (give or take 50, depending on the enterprise), as well docs, comms channels, and systems of engagement, into a more centralized experience. Yes, the future of IT is distributed, but experiences are not. They are the vital new outcome-centered, cohesive journeys that take workers through their role-based processes, tasks, and helps them get to value-based outcomes as quickly as possible.

I would strongly suggest that if we are to see any dramatic improvements to the digital workplace, it will require moving beyond a largely accidental one to a more deliberately designed one, albeit a digital environment where the edges and even much of the center are shaped, personalized, and customized easily by IT, the worker, the local team, and managers as a collaborative effort.

While parts of this notion are now gaining broader acceptance, what’s even better is that we’re now seeing a generation of digital workplace tools emerge that actually enable it (I’ll explore these soon.) Thus, I am now being asked what does such a core experience look like? How does it manifest itself? Is it a Web desktop, smart intranet, a digital experience platform, or a converged mobile app? Is all of these or what? This is what we’re collectively trying to determine, and has been the crux of the issues and roadblocks for so many digital workplace teams of late.

Key Features of a Modern Digital Workplace

Having been on a number of such enterprise-wide digital workplace design efforts in recent years, I can attest to what such a core digital workplace should consist of. Borrowing from my projects with clients, industry research, and analysis, here is what — at an absolute minimum — I believe must be the capabilities and features of any modern digital workplace hub or center of gravity:

• A central experience accessible from any digital environment the worker will use
• A consistent usability model to the degree possible given a highly heterogeneous user experience within the hub
• Foundational feature set (file/doc sharing, content management, task management, collaboration, comms, online community)
• A straightforward and easy-to-learn information architecture, variable by persona
• A way to define personas with easy matching to unique branches in the experience, IA, central experience
• Global search and discovery that works
• Administration and community management features
• Robust 3rd party software integrations and app store
• Online training and digital adoption features, native or add-on
• Easy-to-add business software integrations (for custom built, internal LOB apps)
• Customization options for branding, internal whitelabeling, etc.
• Datacenter locations and choice (logic and data residency)
• Deployment options (on-premises, cloud, hybrid)
• Directory integration (people and groups) including multi-directory
• A persona mapping tool and/or assessment process to take the employee directory and assign workers to personas
• A rich ecosystem of customers, partners, ISVs
• Extensibility and integrations via modern microservices/master graph, APIs and SDKs
• Governance and compliance controls
• Native-quality mobile access
• Personalization features (manual or algorithmic, AI)
• Low code/no code experience and workflow creation by IT or business users
• A digital studio to design task specific end-to-end business processes across multiple apps
• Smart assistive AI across ad hoc cross app usage and workflows
• Reporting tools and workstream/outcome analytics, across integrated apps
• Next gen interfaces including voice input, voice/video transcription, smart assistants, gesture control, VR/AR
• Scalability and robustness
• Security and privacy features
• No restrictions on who the worker can collaborate with (any audience, inside or outside the org)
• Data migration/import from older/previous platforms

The details of what some of these features actually consist of is an exercise for broader industry discussion, which I plan to continue collaboratively online. But it’s safe to say that I think most practitioners would support the majority of what’s listed here. However, I would go a step forther further and underscore that each and every feature is the absolute minimum acceptable set today to achieve an effective digital workplace and employee experience.

The Next Digital Workplace Will Not Resemble Today’s

I also believe large forces and missed opportunities are at work, given the rapid growth we’re seeing in shadow IT for digital workplace, the relatively dire state of the overarching tech-enabled employee experience (workers are generally just clamoring for the rudiments to actually work well, and only 22% think they have a good employee experience at all reports Deloitte). The implication is that most enterprises are not even delivering the fundamentals well, much less zeroing in on the right feature sets that will move them into the future. Instead we are focusing on isolated, over-centralized, one-size-fits-all content-based experiences, and neglect the overall condition of the journey. Instead, we must shift focus to more holistic and connected app-based experiences explicitly designed to deliver the meaningful and effective user experiences that we so deeply wish for and desire.

For the better, the approach of rolling out a largely disconnected grab bag of apps from a checklist is no longer a viable strategy for tech-enabled employee experience. Instead, the modern digital workplace is becoming much more of a common fabric upon which we can design, contextualize, analyze, and optimize the worker experience. It is also highly malleable, 1:1 personalized, and hyperintegrated. Finally, this new smarter digital workplace is anticipatory, predictive, journey-based, data-driven, user-obsessed, and design-informed, including, perhaps most importantly, explicit design for loss of control.

Additional Reading

The Challenging State of Employee Experience and Digital Workplace Today

A Comprehensive Overview of Modern Digital Workplace Trends and Emerging Practices

My Predictions for the Future of Work in 2020