Step Two Designs

Deeper insights from the European winners of the Intranet Innovation Awards

Written by James Robertson, published October 16th, 2012

Categorised under: intranet innovation awards, Intranets

This year it’s wonderful to be able to hand over all but one of the trophies from the Intranet Innovation Awards in person. That’s not just the three Australian winners, but also the winners in Denmark, the Netherlands and the USA.

Apart from being personally satisfying, it’s a great opportunity to learn more about the winning entries, and what they’ve been doing since they put in their award submission, so many months ago.

These are just a few of the interesting insights we’ve uncovered:

Managing a global collection of product details

Screenshot courtesy of Chr. Hansen

Chr. Hansen is a global bioscience company that develops natural ingredient solutions for the food, nutritional, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. With 5,000+ products, and 100,000 related documents, finding the right information is no easy task.

This is what makes the product search solution they delivered so powerful. Drawing together information from SAP and several other databases, it allows sales staff to be more effective.

While their winning entry shares lots of detail on what they delivered, conversations in Denmark uncovered great insights into how Christian Skjaeran manages the intranet behind the scenes.

Every year, the intranet has two planned “releases”, a major release and a minor release. This ensures that new solutions are constantly enhanced and expanded.

Even more impressive is the way that Christian (who sits in comms) coordinates with IT. Sitting down with them at the beginning of the year, he gets a map of all the major IT projects in the pipeline. From that, he works out in advance a series of “release windows” for the intranet, that coincide with quiet times for IT. This gives him confidence that new features can actually be launched and managed, without having to fight for time against other IT activities.

It’s these kind of mature intranet management practices that makes Christian (and his intranet) an award winner.

Sharing in the Dutch government

Screenshot courtesy of Pleio

Pleio is an open-source platform within the Dutch government, established as part of a “Government 2.0″ initiative. It’s aim is to provide a simple environment that can be used by all, whether within a single agency, between agencies, or between the government and citizens.

One story they shared was from Haarlem (a Dutch city), where they found it made sense not just to capture HR information on an intranet in the traditional way, but to actually share the content (and responsibility) between different agencies. This lead to a single HR space that’s used by the local government and the fire department (and beyond). That’s different thinking: why have everyone maintain their own HR information, if it’s common across many different agencies in a region (or a country).

The potential scope of this is exciting. While it’s not a silver-bullet solution, it does open up the possibility of creating information once, to be used many times, independent of the agency or group.

Get the full details

Want to know more about these (and other) winners? The Intranet Innovations 2012 report provides 210 pages of concise insights, including an abundance of screenshots and insights.

(Purchases of the report help to fund the year-long effort it takes to run these global awards.)

Tags: intranet innovation awards, Intranets