IT leaders must be invested in the business benefits of every technology they deploy. Gone are the days when the IT staff was viewed as a cost center with the singular goal of completing technology projects on time and under budget. Today, IT professionals are expected to partner with business leaders to deploy technologies in ways that increase revenue, decrease costs and continually improve the company’s profitability.

The golden opportunity for IT professionals right now is to demonstrate that they can help—even lead—their company’s efforts to become digital-first organizations, ones that produce greater value than ever before. Now is the time for IT leaders to evolve from technology providers into digital business enablers. Evaluating, selecting, procuring and deploying new technology that creates an interactive intranet can be the cornerstone of their evolution. An interactive intranet combines the best of traditional intranets with enterprise social networks to help an organization produce superior operating results.

Rethink Your Intranet.
In a recent blog post, I detailed four reasons why most organizations should be reevaluating their existing intranet now. I’ve also just published a new eBook that describes the interactive intranet in detail, complete with technology evaluation tips, key capabilities to look for, and key benefits for IT and business owners. I encourage you to download and Read a copy of the eBook here.

Interactive Intranets Create Meaningful Connections
An interactive intranet creates value for an organization by improving connections, communication and collaboration. And when digital businesses are highly networked—every employee and piece of information has a digital presence—connections can be made between all of those digital assets. Those connections create a network effect that exponentially multiplies the value of each individual interaction. IT professionals can lay the foundation upon which those connections are made with an interactive intranet.

Once connections have been made between individual employees, groups, digital places and content items, bi-directional communication and information can flow without friction throughout the organization. Everyone is aligned and engaged with a common mission and has the information they need to do their part in helping to achieve it.

Spark Business Transformation and Innovation

IT professionals might be well satisfied after having helped connect their company’s assets and improve communication between them. Who could blame them? Creating the plumbing of the digital, networked business and easing information flow are great achievements, and each by itself produces numerous business benefits. But to achieve maximum value, IT needs to take one more step.

When IT integrates both structured and emergent collaboration capabilities into an interactive intranet, employees can work better together to innovate and solve problems. Only then can the IT professional say that their work has accelerated their firm’s digital transformation and produced new value.

What You Should Do Next
The next step is yours. You can refresh your organization’s existing intranet by adding to it the key interactive intranet capabilities discussed in the eBook. Or, if warranted, you may chose to sunset your existing intranet and move to a new, highly interactive platform that includes those critical capabilities. Either way, it’s time to lead your firm’s digital transformation effort .

Download and read The Future of Intranets and Enterprise Social Networks: Why Businesses Need an Interactive Intranet. Plan the creation of an interactive intranet. Demonstrate how it will better enable digital business and why your existing intranet won’t. Build a realistic case for your business and include the IT benefits that can be expected. Then make it happen and lead your organization toward its digital future.