The 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards uncovered many remarkable ideas and solutions, not least of them being three mobile solutions, from the private, public and educational sectors.

To share these case studies as widely as possible, we’ve published a brand-new Award winning mobile intranets report. This provides three real-world case studies:

• UK Parliament delivering key functionality to MPs, who are rarely in their offices.
• Queensland University of Technology providing staff and students with a mobile portal of remarkably simplicity.
• Lafarge, a global corporation, supporting the yearly senior management retreat with a mobile site.

In addition to the three compelling examples, the report provides further insight from the team at Step Two Designs:

• key themes from the winning case studies
• what staff want on their mobiles
• four types of enterprise mobility
• elements of a mobile intranet strategy

If you are planning to deliver mobile enterprise functionality, this report will give you invaluable ideas and examples to help shape your plans and designs.

Read more about the report

The intranet can be an excellent platform for hosting data and facilitating discussion on customer service insights, experiences and performance. Here are three examples.

Acting on sales data at Omron Europe

Omron Europe was a winner in the 2010 Intranet Innovation Awards. Its winning entry was the ‘Customer Ordering Indicator’ (COI) — a small, powerful utility that allows sales teams to keep track of client transactions throughout the business. The COI alerts relevant account managers each time their client attempts to purchase through another business division, has ordered a new product line and so on. Sales data, and corporate performance data, is presented right on the user’s homepage, allowing them at-a-glance information that’s absolutely critical to their own business performance.

[December one-pager by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

A new feature of the revamped staff directory, this is designed to enable better communication, dialogue and expertise sharing between employees.

A networked organisation

One of DSTA’s strategies is to sustain and increase its multi-disciplinary expertise in defence science and technology. This includes building up new capabilities and encouraging staff to take ownership of their learning and competency development.

As part of an organisational transformation, an Organisation Capability Directorate (OCD) was set up in 2006. The OCD consists of eight competency communities (CCs), which are grouped by technical disciplines and competencies. Every staff member belongs to a CC, which is the ‘home base’ for competency development and career management.

Staff will be assigned to projects that are undertaken by operating units across DSTA, according to job and competency needs.

To enable staff to connect easily to the community they belong to, the KM team worked with the respective CC heads and CC knowledge managers to develop and nurture each CC as a vibrant community, where information and knowledge is shared and exchanged spontaneously and continuously through online and face-to-face interactions.

To build on the communities, a key strategic initiative was to revamp the DSTA staff directory and give users a profile-style page.

[March KM Column written by Kok Chuan Ng, read the full article]

So how can you replace your old, inefficient intranet with a snazzy, new version and get employees to embrace the change? Scottrade knows; the online brokerage firm last year replaced its intranet, “The Insider,” after seven years, and not one of its 2,500 employees complained.

(Scottrade were also Gold Winners in the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards, for their remarkable competitor wiki.)

• Will the name be inanimate, functional, industrial, emotive or something with personality?
• If relaunching the intranet, is the existing name still a viable option?
• Will it build on a company name, or is there ambition to create a distinct identity?
• Once a name is decided upon, what’s the best way to publicise the new site, and will the name become ingrained in organisational vernacular?

In this interview, Website Coordinator Michael Cleland explains why the City of Casey’s intranet was named ‘Boris’ upon its launch in 2006. The site has proved hugely successful, winning an Intranet Innovation award in its first year. Michael says the site’s success is due in large part to its usefulness, but also the creation and powerful, consistent promotion of the intranet’s brand.

S2D: Where does the Boris story start?

When we began developing the City of Casey intranet we didn’t know:

• What it was going to look like
• What it was going to contain
• What it was going to do

What we did know with absolute certainty is that it was not going to be known as ‘the intranet’.

[December KM Column written by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

There is undoubtedly a large amount of online chatting, blogging and social networking going on out there on the world wide web. Even so, organisations often find it difficult to dig these people out from within the internal ranks.

So what is required for effective online collaboration? And what are some strategies for achieving this? Two important prerequisites are:

• key people who have experience using collaboration tools
• people within the organisation who are already working together

Without these two things the mere appearance of collaboration tools will not enable people to use the tools effectively or compel people to work together when they are not already doing so. Using online tools is a discipline — at the very least it is a habit — and key people who are already ‘walking the walk’ are an integral part of the solution. Without these people, would-be collaborators have no models for collaboration.

If you can tick these two boxes and if you are a lone voice, or part of a very small niche group in a very large organisation, this article explores methods for building this capability within organisations. The recent experience of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is used to demonstrate the approach.

[August KM Column by Cairo Walker, read the full article]