2020 transformed the workplace and enhanced digital trends in a way never seen before. With the pandemic in full swing, digital working was necessitated, bringing some new Intranet market trends to the surface.

A Gartner research showed that 74% of the finance leaders plan on moving 5% of the workforce to remote working following the pandemic. Moreover, 25% of the respondents said that they intend to move 10% of the employees to permanent remote working.

As organizations are adapting to this change, the need for a modern Intranet is also increasing. Today, enterprises need a platform where they can collaborate and accomplish the organization’s objectives from a single place.

Owing to this, there are some modern Intranet market trends that companies should be ready to take up in the coming years. Below, we discuss some of these trends.

Post-Pandemic Intranet Market Trends

Even if you’re currently using outdated Intranets, you’ll have to update to keep up with the competition. Here are some Intranet market trends to look out for.

1. SaaS Models

Companies all over the world are turning towards SaaS models as vendors have started offering Intranet as a service. Instead of paying a huge upfront cost, companies can now invest in a monthly subscription plan to get the same features.

Moreover, the economic instability following the pandemic is bound to affect every organization. In times like this, when companies are laying off workers and struggling to reach revenue goals, an Intranet with low expenditure comes as a blessing.

Plus, you can scale the platform according to your needs. Most importantly, you can let go of the worry of upgrading and maintaining the platform as that’s taken care of.

2. Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Mining

The enterprise knowledge is largely unstructured. Therefore, extracting information, like text documents and emails, from this workflow is a difficult task. However, this information adds a lot of value to your company.

That’s why data mining will be among the top-most Intranet market trends in 2021. Modern Intranets follow this approach in the following phases:

• Ingest: Initially, you can use different integrations to bring the data together. Modern enterprises have both unstructured and structured data that can be connected via knowledge mining tools.
• Enrich:  After the data has been captured, it must be tagged and analyzed accordingly. For that, AI technologies come into play. They help in the automation of manual tasks, such as taxonomy usage and metadata generation. Enriching the data ensures that it’s discoverable easily.
• Explore: Today, organizations are more inclined towards using cognitive search engines than old-school search tools. These modern search engines use Natural Language Processing and AI to deliver appropriate search results. Plus, they connect the external apps with the internal enterprise apps to create a single search engine that gives you access to enterprise-wide content.

3. Mobile Integration

Mobile phones will become an even larger subject of interest in 2021 since it’s not always possible for people to be near their desktops. In accordance with this, one of the most prominent Intranet market trends for the year will be mobile integration.

With a phone app, remote workers can stay connected and access the information on the Intranet even if they’re not in the vicinity of a desktop.

Therefore, it will allow them to share and communicate on-the-go while sending real-time updates to enhance productivity and engagement.

4. AI for Idea Management

The modern Intranet allows organizations to gather employee ideas in one place and implement them as required. To move a step further, 2021 will bring in AI for idea management.

An artificial intelligence management system helps innovation in many ways:

• Eliminating repetitive ideas
• Retaining older ideas
• Bringing old ideas to the surface when needed
• Reducing manual toil for idea review
• Using intelligent search to find ideas
• Connecting similar ideas

5. Intranet Success Measuring

The future will surely be built on trial-and-error rather than sticking with a certain system irrespective of how well or poorly it performs. 2021 will see organizations tweaking the Intranet to make it more suitable for the success of the company.

A minor change in the system can make a huge difference, so you should take note of analysis engagement statistics. These will give you an idea about the effectiveness of the Intranet.

Additionally, getting feedback from the users also helps in making the Intranet more user-friendly for the employees and the business as a whole. Here are some ways to measure the Internet’s success.

• Develop a roadmap and metrics to determine success.
• Discuss the features with the stakeholders
• Monitor the metrics dashboard of the Intranet and optimize it as needed
• Reformat the reporting processes

6. Attractive Design

Gone are the days when people were comfortable working with an outdated design. A trend that’s bound to surface in 2021 and carry on to the future is having a good-looking Intranet.

If you’re still using a visually unappealing Intranet from five years ago, it’s about time you change it for higher user engagement and productivity.

7. Faster Bot-Accessed Knowledge

Another likely trend to surface in 2021 is the use of chatbot integrations.

Bots can provide useful information about any topic. For example, a knowledge bot can answer the employee’s questions like ‘How to change the sharing settings’’ or ‘who is the marketing head for the Illinois office’.

Furthermore, employees may use bots for retrieving important documents. For instance, you can tell the bot to get you the audit report from 2018 or send you the travel expense report for the first quarter of 2018.

Depending on what the employees are comfortable with, you can design the bots to interact using voice mediums or text. Think of these bots as personal assistants, but they can also be integrated into message apps, such as Slack or Teams.

Conclusion

2020 taught companies that if your collaborative system is haphazard, you’d hardly get anything done. As a company, you should be prepared to take on any task, whether in person or through remote working.

The upcoming Intranet market trends seem to be immensely focused on integrations, communication, and artificial intelligence. Since these features make workplace operations easier for the workforce, their integration into your modern Intranet is paramount.