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Intranet Innovation Awards 2009

Written by , published January 30th, 2009

Categorised under: Intranets

2009 will mark the third year of the Intranet Innovation Awards coordinated by Step Two Designs, and we’re hoping to see even more fantastic intranet work from organisations far and wide.

Uniquely, the Intranet Innovation Awards recognise individual intranet improvements, and not intranets as a whole. The awards are about improving all intranets, by sharing great ideas and increasing the pace of innovation across the whole of the global intranet community.

Submissions

For this year, submissions will open from March 1st. If you have a a new intranet application, tool, service or feature and you want to submit to the awards you can register your interest and we’ll send you a reminder nearer the time.

You can also get ahead of the curve by checking out some previous winners and commended entries over at the Step Two blog and also in the 2008 and 2007 Awards reports (just US$189 each). Plus, we’ve a range of articles, video interviews and blog posts on some of the winners, which are listed and linked below.

2007 Awards

In 2007, the first year of the Awards, Fiat topped the entries with their “Avanti e Veloci” portal, which played a key role in the manufacturer’s leadership and culture change program (check out YouTube for a great video interview with the winner).

Fellow winners in 2007 included Perkins Eastman (USA – video), Nycomed (Switzerland/Denmark – video), the Environment Agency (UK – video), SunGard AvantGard (USA/New Zealand), and the City of Casey (Australia).

2008 Awards

In 2008, with collaboration tools and Enterprise 2.0 high on the agenda, we saw the superb work from Transfield and their Microsoft SharePoint-based “Teamsites in a box” intranet tool and Scottrade presented a Competitor Wiki called “CIA” (video) that transformed the company’s competitor intelligence gathering. Both companies earned a Gold Award.

In spite of these amazing collaboration examples, however, the Platinum Award for 2008 went to Canadian accounting firm, Fuller Landau, for a range of services delivered to employees that focused on core business activities including a “Partner Dashboard” to improve the internal time and billing system, a “Conflict Checker” and a personal, dashboard-incorporated workflow tool.

Further winners for 2008 included Syngenta (Switzerland), Janssen-Cilag (Australia – video), Urbis (Australia – video coming soon), the Youth Hostel Association (Australia), Swiss Post (Switzerland) and British Airways (UK – video).

What will 2009 bring?

So, what kind of intranet innovations will we see featured in this year’s awards?

We can expect collaboration and social tools to feature prominently again but, undoubtedly, the focus of many intranets remains in simply providing assistance to employees – be that social tools or more core service applications (as we saw with Fuller Landau in 2008).

If we look at some of the key trends from Jane McConnell’s recently published Global Intranet Trends 2009 report, perhaps this year will feature some examples of well-executed search (which, quoting from the report, “remains a pain point for most organisations”) and some more advanced staff directories and effective content strategies and guidelines.

From my previous post: personalisation, task-based processes, enterprise 2.0, RSS and mobile content were high on my list of potential innovation areas for 2009.

In light of the deteriorating economic situation, might we also see an increase in the typical intranet manager’s ability to construct incisive business cases for their systems and align strategically with their organisation’s outlook? Perhaps we’ll even have some examples of innovative metrics on just how valuable the intranet is.

Whatever we might see, there’s no question in my mind that in 2009 the developing role and utility of the intranet will be as diverse as the range of companies that deploy them. If you’re working on something that’s revolutionised the way your colleagues work, saved some money in process or simply made working life a little (or a lot) easier, then consider submitting it to the awards come March.

Don’t forget, you can register your interest and I’d love to hear in the comments below what you think will make the grade for intranets in 2009.

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