Communication and collaboration work hand-in-hand in a modern intranet
One reason companies decide for having an intranet is to communicate important news and information to their employees. In the past, most of this content was primarily created and managed by central teams like a global communications department.
In addition to a central communication a modern intranet needs to provide a simple solution also for other departments and teams to provide content and news. The HR department will want to communicate the latest changes to their benefits programs, the sales leadership will want to talk specifically about sales compensation structure, and so on. All of this needs to be available to employees in the same place. Depending on the employees’ roles they will see exactly the information that’s important to them.
Beside the pure consumption of information employees also want to engage on it: They expect to be able to like and comment on news, to ask questions, see already provided knowledge base articles, or post ideas on how to improve certain processes of the organization.
Information is worth nothing if you can’t trust it
One challenge comes up very often in these scenarios, where people are now talking to each other, or - in other words - collaborate: How can I trust that a certain document is the official content? How can I be sure the answer I got on my question really is the correct one for my organization? How can I trust the person who’s helping me, if I don’t know him and he’s sitting at the other end of this world?
Let’s take an HR example here: Let’s say I found out how parental leave works in my country, and what’s the process to initiate leave, but I have a very specific question that’s not described on that intranet page, or the document, I can just that question. A colleague might answer that question and I might even see that this person works in the HR department, but I can’t be sure that’s the officially correct answer from him.
For such cases in the past you normally used a ticketing system where a group of specifically trained people answered tickets, and you knew that you could be sure the answer was correct.
A ticketing solution though isn’t really scalable: The HR service agents will probably answer that same question tens of times a year over and over again.
To reduce these efforts and still provide employees a trusted source of information SAP Jam offers so called Alias Users.
Posting information under an official department name
Alias Users allow you to create users that can be used by other users. You can give these users any name (along with a picture or logo), and assign real people to them who can then act on behalf of them in the system.
So in our example you can create an alias account with the name “HR team” and assign your internal HR service agents to this alias users. Each agent can then respond to a question in your HR forum as the “HR team”, making sure that the employee recognizes the answer as an official one from the HR department.
Assigning employees to an alias user in SAP Jam
Alias users can do everything that normal users can do as well: Answer questions, post blog posts and documents, create knowledge base articles, even setting up entire collaboration groups.
This also has the advantage that employees don’t have to reach out to and rely on certain people, but they can communicate with the entire HR team and through that with all assigned people. This is achieved by the fact that you can even mention alias users in questions and comments in the same way as normal employees.
In a global intranet the list of such alias users can include things like “Global Communications”, “Office of the CEO”, “Sales Compensation Team”, “IT Support”, “HR Germany”, “HR Americas”,…
List of alias users in an SAP Jam system
So what are you using alias users for?
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