The social intranet as a motor for digital transformation The digital transformation is a big challenge for companies and organisations. Often enough, new digital and sleek products and businesses are the main focus. But one big step is indeed a company’s own intranet, as UEBERBIT shows. The company is an expert for digital platforms and workspaces and develops individual and innovative solutions.
intranet to share information, so that all employees always have the same level of knowledge. For smaller companies, the focus on the other hand might lie on project work and collaborating independently from sites or time zones.
TEXT: JESSICA HOLZHAUSEN I PHOTOS: UEBERBIT
“The intranet shows, relatively clearly, how well prepared a company is for the digitalisation,” says Dr Boris Stepanow, who founded the Mannheim-based company in 1996 together with Daniel Bönisch, with whom he heads the company still today. Naturally, the digitalisation in companies is initially connected with technological topics and mainly challenges IT planners and strategists. But to just count on technology, neglects the communicative component: The digital transformation is always connected with a social and communicative change in companies. “Less top-down, a different flow of information and a bigger focus on collaboration,” says Stepanow. “At the core of companies, many things have started moving – and that has to be carried by all 130 | Issue 74 | May 2019
employees to work on a long-term basis.” Here, the social intranet comes into play. For many companies today, it functions as main medium for internal communication – expanded by the social components of modern collaborative functions: sharing, commenting, uploading files and interacting. Employees already know these from social networks. The social intranet uses the same functions, without simply copying social networks. “It lives through the participation of employees.” How exactly the social intranet looks, depends on companies’ individual needs: “As different as they are themselves, are the requirements for their intranet,” says Stepanow. Big, decentralised companies with offices in different cities use the
Standard solutions cannot fulfil these demands. UEBERBIT therefore uses an individual approach: during the conception phase it first has to become clear what the requirements are and how the new intranet interacts with legacy systems. Future users also have to be included. ‘User centered design’ is the key term here. It has been shown that individual solutions not only work better, but because of their usability and efficiency also gain a higher acceptance. “If the introduction of the social intranet is accompanied by a good change support, a big step towards cultural change has already been made. And so the intranet can be become a driver for the digital transformation in companies,” concludes Stepanow. www.ueberbit.de