5 must haves for a modern digital platform

Mar 28, 2019

#Digital Transformation

A digital platform can help to positively transform the operation of your business, providing the platform has the right features and capabilities to support the needs of your organization. There are a number of digital platforms on the market, so how do you decide what platform you need? Let’s take a look at some of the absolute must haves for any effective digital platform.

Employees working together on their modern digital workplace platform

#1. Content management

Content is extremely important for the success of your business. A user-friendly content management system (CMS) can empower your employees to take ownership of creating and uploading content online. An intuitive CMS is vital for this as it removes the reliance on IT to make content-based changes.

Encourage content creators in your organization to consider new, creative ways of surfacing information by making content management easy with multilingual capabilities, targeted homepages, document and media management, audience targeting, responsive preview and workflows.

#2. Analytics data

Cutting edge analytics data is very important to ensure that your digital workplace platform is successful. Driving adoption and increasing engagement are two of the greatest challenges with a digital platform, meaning you need to understand how your users are interacting with it.

Analytics data gives you the ability to truly measure performance by showing what content users are responding best to or are they finding the tools they need to do their job? This level of insight will ensure that you don’t need to guess about what changes to make, you will know what is needed to drive adoption and increase engagement.

#3. Social feature

On average people now have eight social media accounts, meaning your staff will be familiar with using social platforms in their free time that offer the chance to engage with posts. Make the most of user’s familiarization with social interactions by providing social features as part of your digital platform.

This empowers users to react, comment and share with their colleagues, giving every employee the opportunity to participate in discussions and share their views. This can in turn lead to better communication throughout your organization.

A digital platform should have a number of social features to truly connect your workforce including:

Commenting, custom reactions, @ mentioning and the ability to use # hashtags
Badges and kudos allow employees to be recognized and rewarded for their contributions to the social space
Following capabilities allows employees to follow pages, channels and people to make sure they are seeing the update they want and need to see
A people directory removes the physical boundaries that traditionally separate your workforce, allowing employees to find colleagues across different departments and locations
Organizational charts clearly show the structure of a department, so employees can easily identify who they need to talk to depending on the situation

#4. Ability to integrate

The likelihood is that your business is using applications and tools already, and many of these applications will be integral to your business operation. You may have even invested significant time and money in training your employees to use these tools. For this reason, a digital platform needs to be flexible and customizable, allowing for third party application integration.

Some digital platforms do not have the capability to integrate third-party applications and this must be taken into consideration when choosing the right platform for your organization.

#5. Collaboration systems

On average employees spend around 30% of their time each day trying to find information, and this has a negative impact on productivity. A successful digital platform acts as a collaboration site that brings together project or departmental resources and discussion. This is done by bringing all critical information from external systems and 3rd party tools into one place, which will significantly reduce time waste by staff searching for what they need to get the job done.

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Choosing a digital platform for your business

For a digital platform to successfully support your business it needs to be flexible and provide functionality. With so many digital platforms available it can be difficult to choose which one is best for your business, so it’s important to be aware of the must-have features and capabilities.

Unily provides a fully-loaded modern digital workplace platform that truly unites and empowers your enterprise. We have provided digital workplace solutions to multinational corporations including Microsoft, Amec Foster Wheeler and Dorma+Kaba.

Get in touch to find the right digital platform for your business.