A portal literally means a gate. Therefore, an organizational portal is the gate, the entrance to the organization. According to a common definition, the portal is the entrance gate through and from which we wish the user to access all documents and applications. An organizational portal serves as the entrance gate for organizational workers and one of its main objectives is to manage the corporate knowledge; it enables us to link information, knowledge and data via incorporated windows.
Does this definition withstand the test of time?
The cultural changes that have occurred, such as the social networks, which have become a massive time consumer for users of all ages, together with the accelerated digital development pace and an enormous amount of information available at all times have affected our personal content consumption habits as well as raised the expectations from the organizational portal- both in terms of content and technological aspects.
What does this mean?
We are accustomed to certain abilities when visiting different websites- searching for information and finding it quickly using Google, performing different activities such as shopping via E-form, paying bills, booking an appointment, keeping in touch with your friends through Facebook, choosing content which interests us on Pinterest, etc. Therefore, expecting similar abilities from the organizational systems at the workplace are merely natural.
As a result, one of the substantial trends in this field is changing the organizational conception from "Intranet" to "Digital Workplace". This change of approach is manifested by the following transitions:
from an organizational homepage (with similar content for all workers) to a personal homepage
from mainly static data to mostly dynamic data
from focusing on organizational news to mainly social content
from a single content manager/central management to involving multiple content management
from using informative language (read) to motivating towards action (do)
from a page manager that edits the content to a page manager that is actually a Feed manager
from adjusted Desktop design to responsive design
from fixed design to design which allows more structural flexibility and dynamic design
from flat content to layered content
from a focus on navigation and menus to relevant and efficient search functions
from searching for knowledge experts to an era of Wisdom of the Crowd in which everybody contributes to the accumulated knowledge.
In conclusion, the digital environment is an inseparable part of our daily conduct and assists us in fulfilling our daily tasks effectively as well as allows substantial saving of resources, including efficient time utilization.
Well, why should our workplace offer a different experience?
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