Often referred to as “the one place where you start and end your day” or “the one place where you can find all the information about your organization and your role”, the idea that you can create a single location, whether an Intranet or more recently something like Microsoft Teams, to be the only thing your workforce needs has been fed to us by software vendors and information consultants. It is the mythical “enterprise front door” that takes all needs into account, for everyone. After more than 20 years in the business, I have never met an organization (client or otherwise) that has achieved half of what was idealized, and even then it didn’t last very long before falling apart. But don’t take my word for it – read this great article by Sam Marshall on the Digital Workplace Hubs: Nice in Theory, Not in Practice (reworked.co).
There are multiple, very real pain-points that Digital Workplaces, or Hubs, are trying to solve. Including:
Most of them start out by limiting the number of users who will even have access to the system by making it an Intranet [reference stats that show max users per day], or by trying to enforce a way that everyone needs to work without looking into how they work. It also makes several incorrect assumptions about how people want to be engaged with and how important they will see going to the intranet every few hours as being.
Another reason that they fail is that with all of the eggs in one massive basket, even if the initial solution can be built, it becomes a problem of maintaining it. Quickly the very things that were drawing people in become stale, Communications can’t produce enough content, departments aren’t talking ownership of keeping their areas up to date, and then it becomes a challenge of finding what’s needed, knowing where the right information is, and the frustration of old becomes new again.
Sparrow has been designed from the ground-up to be a distributed communication platform and address the problems that Hubs have been trying to solve.
Sparrow is omnichannel (Why omnichannel is the only path forward – Sparrow (sparrowconnected.com)), we surface all this functionality in wherever platform makes sense to the individual. That is likely to vary across work styles in the same organization. For people who work all the time in Teams, the notifications may appear there alongside chat and task notifications. For frontline workers, your universal search may exist in our dedicated employee app.