Left to right: Sharon O'Dea (UK Parliament), Alex Jackson (Framestore), James Robertson (Step Two Designs), Adam Pope (Arup)

We had a lovely informal awards ceremony in London yesterday for the recently announced Intranet Innovation Award winners for 2011. With three UK-based winners this year, we organised a ceremony as part of the quarterly Intranetters meeting.

There was a great turnout, and it was an invaluable opportunity for everyone to ask questions of the Award winners. So well done to all winners!

Each year, we run a free roadshow throughout Australia, where you will hear all about the winning entries, see screenshots and hear what set these entries apart from the rest.

These afternoons will be presented by James Robertson, Australia’s own intranet expert. With teams from every type of organisation attending, it’s also a great opportunity to make connections that will last.

Dates:

• Brisbane: 25th October (register online)
• Canberra: 2nd November (register online)
• Sydney: 8th November (register online)
• Melbourne: 30th November (register online)

Since these are free sessions, book fast before places run out!

This is what makes the Intranet Innovations 2011 report so valuable. Sharing full details on the just-announced Award winners, this report contains screenshots galore, along with plenty of details, ideas, insights and lessons learnt.

The report is designed to be dipped into, providing at-a-glance knowledge and concise learnings. It also provides a strong foundation for generating executive support, and creating a compelling business case.

This year we’ve repriced the report to make it more accessible for all intranet teams, and if you’ve missed out on previous years, just $100 extra will give you the full Intranet Innovations bundle, containing all five years of the awards.

This is the must-have annual resource for all intranet teams.

Platinum award winner

• Visual effects project management tool
  Framestore (UK)

Gold awards winners

• Mobile intranet
  Queensland University of Technology (Australia)
• Mobile intranet
  UK Parliament (UK)
• Just in time content
  CRS Australia (Australia)
• Expertise location and LinkedIn connector
  Lundbeck (Denmark)
• Personalisation
  Malmo Stad (Sweden)
• Alu TV video sharing platform
  Alcatel-Lucent (France)
• SportsAid Amazing Race
  Arup (UK)
• Customer-centric intranet
  ScottsMiracle-Gro (USA)
• Online and mobile conference tool
  Lafarge (France)

Commended entries

• Find-o-meter
  Vancity (Canada)
• Daisy the intranet
  RSPCA Victoria (Australia)
• Social intranet
  RPC (UK)
• Faceted search
  CSIRO (Australia)

It’s been a hugely enjoyable process for all the judges and editorial team working on the awards. Yet again, we’ve surfaced remarkable, surprising and impressive ideas that will be of interest to all intranet teams.

This year we’ve got three mobile intranet solutions, core business systems, just-in-time information delivery, social intranets, video, and much more.

Grab a copy of the Intranet Innovations 2011 report for more.

Why am I telling you this? Because there will be a unique opportunity to meet the UK’s award winners in a relaxed setting, as part of the upcoming Intranetters session in London. The session will feature:

• presentation by Nigel Williams of ROMEC
• intranet walkthrough by James Mullan of Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP
• the low-down on this year’s award-winning entries (presented by me)
• an informal awards ceremony
• chatting at the pub afterwards

That’s a lot of great stuff in one afternoon (especially one that costs nothing!).

The session has been kindly hosted by The Crown Estate, and there’s only so many people that can be squeezed into the room.

Key details:

When: 1.30pm (for a 2.00pm start), Tuesday October 11

Where: The Crown Estate, W1S 2HX

How much: free!

RSVP’s essential: email rod_mclean@hotmail.com

PS. don’t forget I’m also running my one-day Designing intranets that work workshop in London on Monday October 17, and there are still places available. This is a great fun workshop to run, and to attend, so don’t miss out.

This year, our practitioner judge comes from Europe, and I’m very pleased to introduce Nina Sonne Nikolaisen from COWI in Denmark. COWI won an Intranet Innovation Award in 2009, has been recognised by the Nielsen Norman Group, and was a winning intranet at the 2009 IntraTeam event in Denmark.

With a focus on user involvement, functional web design, change management and knowledge management, Nina is ideally placed to judge this year’s awards.

Welcome Nina!

Don’t forget: entries for the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards close on May 31. Entering is free, so don’t miss your chance to win a lovely glass trophy!

To pass the time, we asked our judges and supporters what sorts of things they’d like to see. We received a wonderfully diverse list of answers:

• best practices in intranet personalisation, in combination with identity management and portal applications
• business benefit from the social side of their intranets/digital workplace
• true support and/or connection to key business processes in the organization
• integration of multiple applications and data sources that provides users with a seamless experience
• application where employees and customers (or suppliers) collaborate (Inter-Enterprise-Collaboration)
• news concept which successfully merges top-down as well as bottom-up and social aspects to communications
• information management concept for Wikis that fosters contribution but manages information overload and lifecycle
• all things done on a PC are done in the same skin and layout
• enterprise mobility
• innovative ways of supporting multiple languages
• use of an intranet by staff who are in a manufacturing/retail environment
• integration of business, product and market data
• social search
• automatically delivering content from other sources
• great ways to keep authors informed and engaged
• workable governance models especially for SharePoint sites

That’s quite a list! It shows that the Intranet Innovation Awards cover a wide spectrum of ideas, and many organisations will have a at least a few solutions or approaches worthy of an award. (Don’t forget: the Awards only judge individual ideas, not intranets as a whole.)

So don’t be shy! Submit an entry this year, or get in touch to get some advice on what to submit.

(Thanks to Erik Hartmann, Jane McConnell, Samuel Driessen, Lukas Karrer, Kurt Sorensen, Martin White, Nina Sonne Nikolaisen, Catherine Grenfell and James Robertson.)

This year’s Awards are now open for entries, with submissions closing on Tuesday 31 May 2011. Visit the entry page for full details on the awards process, including the submission form.

Don’t be shy! It’s important to remember that we’re not judging intranets as a whole, instead we’re looking for individual ideas or solutions that are of benefit to staff and the organisation as a whole. This can be as small as an elegant approach to commenting on the intranet, or as big as redeveloping a key business process.

If in doubt, get in touch, and we’ll happily give some tips on what to enter for this year’s awards.

This is a great opportunity to win a lovely glass trophy. More than that, public visibility in the intranet community is also very powerful for building support within your organisation. Who can say no to an award winner!

(Thanks to the supporters of the Awards: Entopic, Hartman Communicatie, Intranet Focus, IntraTeam, J. Boye, NetStrategy/JMC, Prescient Digital Media, Stimmt and Straits Knowledge.)

To help you identify the best of your work to submit, here are four video interviews from last year’s awards, covering very different aspects of intranets:

Knowledge management and precendents at a law firm

Communities of practice at a global engineering firm

Social intranet and personalisation at an animation house

Information as a business tool at IMF

When I was in Washington DC late last year, I had a chance to do a video interview with Deb Reilly from IMF, on their Gold winning entry to the 2010 Intranet Innovation Awards.

On the face of it, what they did was incredibly simple: they brought together all the information they know about a country (a lot!) into a single location. But this glosses over how smart this is, drawing on both static and dynamic content, integrating with key systems, and using an effective taxonomy.

Watch the 7 minute video to learn more about:

• responding to a global crisis
• tackling knowledge changes
• All about a Country
• business benefits
• tips for other organisations

Obtain the Intranet Innovations report to read the full detail on what they IMF have done.

When I was in London late last year, I was pleased to have an opportunity to record a video interview with Faith Wainwright of Arup. Gold winners of the 2010 Intranet Innovation Awards, their skills networks are powerful and global communities of practice. Of great interest to intranet teams and knowledge managers alike.

In this 8 minute video, we cover:

• Challenges for a global consultancy?
• What are skills networks?
• Evolution of the networks?
• Business benefits?
• Lessons learnt?
• Tips for others?

KMWorld in Washington DC last week gave us a wonderful opportunity to meet up with many of our Intranet Innovation Award winners for 2010. Their work was also of keen interest to the rest of the conference participants.

Connie Crosby was kind enough to record this video interview with Brian Bawden of Bennett Jones, exploring the remarkable intranet work they’ve done within their law firm.

(Connie runs the great law firm blog Slaw, and read her full post here. Thanks Connie!)

I’ve had a great time at the KMWorld 2010 conference in Washington DC this week. The highlight was handing over trophies to many of the Intranet Innovation Award winners for the 2010. It was great that so many made it to the conference, and thanks to Kurt Sorensen for recording this video!

Congratulations again to all the winners! It’s also not too late to join us at KMWorld, where I’ll be talking about the future of intranets, and a number of the award winners will be presenting on their work.

In 2010 there were over 50 entries, resulting in:

• One Platinum award winner: Bennett Jones (Canada)
• Eight Gold award winners: Airways Corporation (New Zealand), AMP (Australia), Arup (UK), Framestore (UK), IMF (USA), MITRE (USA), Omron Europe (Netherlands), Shepherd and Wedderburn (UK)
• Seven Commended entries: Arup (UK), Coca-Cola Enterprises (USA), Monash University (Australia), Rijkswaterstaat (Netherlands), University Medical Centre Groningen (Netherlands), Ziggo (Netherlands)

These examples present a number of themes, and signpost the next stage of evolution for the majority of intranets, which I’ll explore in this article.

15 case studies, 200 screen shots

The full annual Intranet Innovations 2010 report features detailed case studies of all 15 winning and commended entries and over 200 intranet screen shots of the sites in question. It’s available to purchase directly from the Step Two Designs website:

www.steptwo.com.au/products/iia2010

Here are themes that emerged this year.

Content is no longer king

For the last decade, intranets have been considered to be an internal website for staff, but the innovative intranets of 2010 have thoroughly dispelled this misconception. Instead, they’re showing that intranets can be business tools that streamline processes and deliver new ways of connecting with staff.

[November article by Alex Manchester, read the full article]