Award Winning Intranets of 2009 #intra10

3rd keynote at Intranet 2010 by James Robertson of Step Two Designs.

Innovation = originality + impact. Uncovering great ideas and approaches to intranet, so you can steal them (ethically of course).

James tells how the Intranet Innovation Award is set up. Jane McConnell is one of the judges. She should be one of next year's keynote at Intranet 2011.

CRS Australia is the Platinium award winner:

  • seamless connection with SAP (human friendly interface so tasks get done, webforms etc) > done with one technical person

AEP (USA) Idea system:

  • $8 million of concrete savings, $2 million in first month
  • first offline organization, then support via platform
  • organize around problems (a specific question!)
  • specific target: min. of $1.7 million dollars of saving
  • None of the generated ideas are anonymous (same for Océ). Anonymous posts are allowed but not published. They are sent to team.

Next example, Russian firm (CHTPZ). Integrates intranet with mobile. Lots of staff doesn't sit at desk. So push info to the staff and to the tools/devices they use.

Next award is for IDEO. Core: connecting people with people as richly as you can. They can fire off complex queries for people with certain expertise in a certain area. They applied their design research to their intranet.

Prophet (USA), Online performance measurement on the intranet. Improve and simplify the process. It saves them a lot of time.

Plus much more on the Step Two Design webpage. Contributions close on April 23.

Popular posts

Keep the Intranet Small

Image
This tweet by Jonathan Phillips ( @digitaljonathan ) triggered to finalize this post, that's been burning in my draft box. I've always been intrigued by how unsuccessful many intranets are. And there are all kinds of good reasons for intranet failure. One of the things that is hardly ever mentioned is: Shouldn't the intranet be smaller? Usually intranets are huge. Lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of content. With complex navigation. The intranet  evaluation surveys almost always show employees only use the news page and people finder. But still we build and maintain nice big intranets. Not only stats point to smaller intranets. There are others reasons as well. I came up with a few. If you have more, just leave a comment. Here's my list: -            user requirements: users don't require large intranet -            search/navigation: searching and navigating a small intranet is easier than in a large intranet -            mobile: the content of the
Read more

Enterprise 2.0 Research

Image
There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study? Goals of the study To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia; To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy; To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business; To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers; To analyse an
Read more

Innovation in Turbulent Times

Image
I love reading articles about innovation. And every now and then you read one that is very interesting. "Innovation in Turbulent Times" by Rigby, Gruver, Allen (in HBR, June 2009) is one of them. This article takes fashion companies as an example for continuous, year-by-year innovation. And how successful fashion companies are usually led by two people: a left-brainer and a right-brainer. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson." They extend this to show that successful non-fashion companies have the same kind of leadership. And this kind of leadership is usually also characterized by a long-term relationship. I think this concept can also be extended to teams and projects as well. More often than not, people are good at one or the other: thinking up great concepts or ideas, or, making them. In teams and projects we can learn from this as
Read more