Is your intranet CMS enterprise-ready?

When operating at a truly global level, complexity is expected as standard. The efficacy of communication and knowledge sharing across that complexity is paramount to enterprise success. Powering the entire digital employee experience, a CMS that combines sophistication with simplicity is indispensable for handling the intricate web of needs across a large enterprise.

Enterprise complexity demands a balance of sophistication and simplicity

Cross-pollination of knowledge and technology across all dimensions of a modern enterprise requires a robust infrastructure to make it happen. Therefore, choosing the right technology partner with a proven track record in multi-territory support and a reliable, global presence becomes crucial.

Reliably accurate personalization and audience segmentation are cornerstones of an effective employee experience. Enterprise-grade targeting should originate from a trusted, single source of truth; a people directory that can be easily sliced and accurately tapped into across compelling comms.

All of this sounds powerful, and it is, but it doesn’t need to be complicated or finicky to use by bread-and-butter communicators. When powerful sophistication sits behind intuitive simplicity? That’s the holy grail of content management systems.

This approach becomes even more important in a multilingual, multi-region, or multiband context.

The dangers of a flat, unrefined CMS structure

The archaic approach of employing separate CMS environments for each site within an enterprise leads to a world of challenges. Imagine you have a separate CMS environment for each sub-brand site or geographical location in which an enterprise operates. That’s going to get messy - fast.

Without a hierarchical structure spanning across all sites, navigation, governance, content creation, management, ownership, and access become convoluted. Clunkiness becomes a dominant issue when you’re trying to manage sub-brands, various geographies, or really any other slice of intranet frontend – if you’re using an unrefined, flat CMS. A comms person will want to breathe life into consistent, considered messaging. As managing content across its lifecycle becomes an unruly nightmare, this becomes next to impossible.

A flat, unsophisticated CMS structure will be made-up of various content libraries that will all require siloed maintenance, and campaigns will require manual coordination across separate environments.

How does a flat CMS impact business outcomes?

The lack of cohesion caused by a flat, unsophisticated CMS not only impedes strategic execution but also erodes brand consistency and coherence of message. Delivering the calibre of comms expected by modern workforces can’t be achieved with a disconnected, rudimentary structure.

Ever-multiplying and disparate CMS environments will have an impact on your comms teams too. They’ll come to feel disempowered as they feel a strain on their resources and the growing sense that strategy execution is destined for suffocation.

Low adoption rates plague intranet platforms where content is misaligned, out of date, or poorly governed. Unintuitive UX that makes it cumbersome to navigate your platform can make things even worse. Siloed content creation and management processes will in turn inhibit knowledge sharing and collaboration. Employees will feel lost in a sea of impersonal, inconsistent, and unreliable content. A surge of digital friction will rise across the enterprise, crushing user experience and breeding confusion.

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Hope for an enterprise-ready CMS that powers alignment in your business is out there.

3 Must-Haves for any modern, enterprise-ready CMS

1. An intuitive, infinite content tree

A modern CMS should offer a tiered hierarchy and a logical content tree. These prerequisites are designed to handle enterprise-scale operations and crucially to properly support content management, governance, and publication.

Most organization’s ecosystems will have their complexities, that’s the nature of the beast. An enterprise intranet CMS must be well-equipped to reflect every twist and turn across a well-organized content tree.

2. Centralized, connected navigation

An enterprise-ready content management system should encompass a seamlessly connected navigation at its core. This should be centralized and equipped to dissolve silos and primed to enable cross-pollination of knowledge.

An intricately connected navigation will easily weave together content sources from across the enterprise, minimizing duplication and driving synergy. It will reduce digital friction, fostering a consistent and intuitive user experience on the back end whilst doing the same for your employees on the front end.

What makes a connected navigation even more valuable is the ease with which you’ll be able to upskill teams. Stakeholders from comms, HR, or IT teams will get up to speed quicker, with more accuracy in learning when your navigation is intuitive and joined-up in the ways they expect. This will drive positive business outcomes and efficiencies across teams, brands, functions, geographical regions, and every slice of the enterprise.

3. Highly flexible personalization framework

A modern, enterprise-grade CMS should provide a highly flexible framework for audience segmentation and content personalization. This should empower communicators to build their own audiences, placing ownership and clear accountability where it should be. This also drives efficiencies, smoothens execution, and reduces bottlenecks as teams won’t need to rely on a separate, potentially distant team for the right to shape an audience.

This flexible framework should accommodate enterprise-scale with the ability to plug into an unlimited source of information. 360-degree user profiles bring your flourishing and diverse workforce to life in your CMS.

A framework like this will enable granular audience segmentation and sophisticated targeting to drive tailored comms with enhanced relevancy. As these comms will be highly geared to employees individually, you can expect to see increased engagement and adoption across your intranet platform.

How does a modern, enterprise-ready CMS power success in the real world?

Stantec

With 22,000 employees and over 350 offices globally, Stantec – a core Unily customer - wanted to bring its inspired culture to life through compelling stories that successfully spotlight employees' work. ‘The Lens’ serves as a ‘digital home’ for the company narrative, a place to spotlight best practices, showcase the impact of employees' work, and share inspiring stories in real-time.

Stantec believes that its CMS underpins all of this. They’ve found that fine-tuned targeting and granular personalization controls allow content producers to ensure stories reach the people that matter most. Internal communicators can direct content to employees by location or department to help cut through the noise, delivering a curated experience for every user. A key stakeholder at Stantec said, “It was really important that it made things easier on our content production team so they were able to concentrate on what they do best.”

Kerzner

Bringing together over 15,000 colleagues made up of around 70% frontline workers across 135 nationalities, this iconic organization uses a modern, sophisticated CMS on its mission to connect colleagues with its vision and each other.

Kerzner is a vibrant and complex business made up of a collection of many sub-brands. They’re seeking to align employees siloed by sub-brands and locations with a single Kerzner narrative and experience.

Their robust CMS enables the cross-pollination of knowledge with a centralized, joined-up navigation, helping them manage this complexity. Their enterprise-ready CMS ensures that no matter what location or sub-brand an employee works within, they’re able to connect with a compelling and consistent Kerzner voice.

A CMS for enterprise uplift and strategic success

In transitioning from a siloed, rigid intranet CMS, which will undoubtedly lead to under-adoption, to a modern communication ecosystem fit for progress, enterprises can unlock the full potential of their diverse workforce.

In the digital age, employees expect personalized, modern communications that resonate with their unique perspectives. By investing in a modern CMS that prioritizes hierarchical structure, connected navigation, and flexible personalization, organizations can enhance employee engagement, foster knowledge sharing, and drive strategic alignment across the enterprise. Don’t let your CMS leave you behind.