In 2011 there were over 50 entries, resulting in:

• One platinum award winner: Framestore (UK)
• Nine gold award winners: Queensland University of Technology (Australia), UK Parliament (UK), Lafarge (France), Alcatel-Lucent (France), Lundbeck (Denmark), Malmö Stad (Sweden), ScottsMiracle-Gro (USA), Arup (UK), CRS Australia (Australia)
• Four commended entries: RPC (UK), Vancity (Canada), RSPCA Australia (Australia), CSIRO (Australia)

These excellent entries suggest a number of key themes, six of which are explored in this article.

14 case studies, 200 screen shots

The full annual Intranet Innovations 2011 report features detailed case studies of all 14 winning and commended entries, around 200 intranet screen shots of the sites in question and articles from the judges. It’s available to purchase directly from the Step Two Designs website. At $89 we believe it represents great value.

Here are the six themes we found.

[November article by Steve Bynghall, read the full article]

Alongside brand-new “social intranets” are traditional intranets still focusing on the fundamentals.
What we’re seeing is a landscape of two-speed intranets. While there is plenty of overlap between the go-fast and go-slow intranets, there are also many differences. If we’re to close the gaps, we need to recognize that there is no one-size- fits-all approach.

Stealing approaches from the public web, the enterprise space is becoming much richer and more vibrant. Collaboration tools of all kinds are being tried and adopted, introducing new ways of connecting staff members. In some cases, organizations are ditching old intranets and replacing them with social intranets that democratize participation.

Beyond the purely social and collaborative space, modern approaches dramatically simplify developing enterprise applications. This has enabled innovative teams to deliver business solutions targeting key needs in months rather than years. This has transformed go-fast intranets into powerful business tools.

While these intranets are the ones that you hear about at conferences, the reality is that they’re still very much in the minority. In these early stages, the right conditions need to be in place to enable this type of innovation. The challenge for these new intranets is to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In some cases, the lessons hard learned over the past decade have been forgotten, on the idealistic assumption that new technologies trump old problems.

[Editorial in Intranets magazine, read the full post]

Yet delivering a great intranet in a global business isn’t easy. Typically major intranet projects are run out of head office, with substantial budgets and the latest technologies. In theory, the new intranet is then rolled out across the organisation, to the farthest corners of the globe.

But this is where the problems start. What works in New York, Frankfurt, London or Paris, doesn’t necessarily work in Singapore, Sydney, Beijing or Rio. Resources are tighter, needs are different, and cultures vary.

What some organisations are discovering is that the greatest source of innovation is not the latest technology in head office, but the solutions already developed in far-distant locations.

Frugal innovation

Reading business journals, the latest discussions on innovation focus on what’s becoming called “lean innovation”, “frugal innovation” or “reverse innovation”. This turns on the head the idea that innovation happens in first-world countries, and then pushed out to third-world markets.

Instead, it recognises that necessity is the mother of all invention. With limited budgets and cost-conscious consumers, emerging markets are increasingly developing new products that are both better and cheaper. These can then be brought into established markets as disruptive new solutions.

Perhaps the most well known example is GE’s development of a cheap hand-held medical imaging device in an emerging market. Originally intended to reach hospitals that couldn’t afford the full-service solution, it’s gone on to transform well-established markets throughout the globe.

“It would be like strapping a gold brick to the back of their motorbikes”

Work we did for one global firm provides a similar example in the intranet space. We were responsible for researching intranet needs and issues in Asia, as part of a global project run by Martin White of Intranet Focus.

As part of this, we talked to staff in Singapore. They told us about the troubles they had with using the solutions provided by the head office in Europe. The intranet technologies were too expensive, it was impossible to get support and training with an 8-hour time difference, and every midnight in Europe the servers were taken down for maintenance (which was the start of the working day in Singapore).

They also told us about the even greater challenges faced by sales staff in Vietnam. The standard global solution for sales teams was to provide them for a laptop to use when visiting customers. But what we were told was this: “it would be like getting the sales staff to strap a gold brick to the back of their motorbikes”. (The laptops would be stolen in moments, or destroyed by the rough roads.)

Instead, the local office had developed a handheld solution for a fraction of the price. Head office knew nothing of this solution. More significantly, this solution had the potential to be lower-priced and more effective than the corporate solution, with use throughout the globe.

Uncovering successes

The big advantage of global businesses is that they’re, well, big. More like small countries than companies, there are literally hundreds of individual business units scattered across dozens of countries, each potentially developing their own solutions.

This is a hotbed of innovation. Some approaches will be bad, and should be discarded, but there will also be some gems waiting to be uncovered.

So alongside traditional top-down intranet improvements (which are still valuable), central intranet teams should seek out pre-existing successes. The following approach will help:

1. Seek out innovation. Spend time out of head office, visiting staff in regional locations. Take these “fact-finding missions” out to frontline and operational staff, and look for local ideas that have been previously unrecognised.
2. Give recognition. Celebrate local innovation, both at head office and in other regions. “World fairs” and similar approaches have long been used for this.
3. Pilot in other regions. Take the best of the ideas, and try them out in other countries and business units. Some will succeed immediately, others will fail, and many will be adapted to meet differing circumstances.
4. Spread the successes. Take the most successful ideas, and incorporate them into strategic plans and projects, rolling them out throughout the organisation, alongside top-down activities.
5. Grow a culture of universal innovation. Use early successes to grow a business culture of seeking out (and supporting) innovation throughout the globe. (Model this work on customer-facing strategies that are already in place in many organisations.)

None of this is to say that uncovering and sharing local innovations will be easy. There are significant barriers in terms of travel costs, corporate culture, differences in regional practices, and IT complexity. Despite these hurdles, smart organisations are increasingly realising that frugal innovation applies to staff-focused solutions, and not just to consumer-facing products.

What have you seen work?

Common questions

For those new to intranets there is certainly immediate value in exploring the most valuable core intranet tools such as great people directories, easy to find support services like HR, and a search function that returns useful results. However, answers to other common questions can be more challenging to implement.

Many of the common questions encountered include:

• What is the best governance model?
• Who should own the intranet?
• How much will an intranet cost?
• What is the best technology to use?
• Which technology tools should we deploy?

These are all valid and important questions to ask and by all means draw on the experience of those who have walked the walk before. However expecting to transplant other solutions and answers directly into your own organisation can be problematic.

(August article by Stephen Byrne, read the full article)

The client in question has a pretty typical intranet: well-structured and content-rich. Future visions might be expected to include further upgrades to the staff directory, more collaboration tools, two-way communications and more online forms.

One word came up time and time again, however: mobile. From senior management down to the intranet team, everyone described a world in which staff could access enterprise information wherever they were.

This was more than just a mobile stylesheet for the whole intranet. Instead, the desire was to deliver key content (and often tools) that staff need on their mobile phones or iPads.

A key manager described the needs of a key audience, highlighting how often they were away from their desks, and how much time was spent in meetings. They outlined a vision where their mobile devices, based on GPS information, would deliver contextual information and tools based on whether they are at their desks, in the meeting rooms, or at airports.

Powerful stuff. It was also fascinating to see how quickly the consumer experience of modern phones was driving enterprise thinking, much faster than previous technology shifts.

Of course, this is a huge challenge for intranet teams, IT teams, and technology vendors. We’re going to need some quick movement to meet staff expectations!

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]

A must-have for all intranet teams, it shares details on the 2010 winners of the global Intranet Innovation Awards, and gives insight into the leading edge of intranets.

Use the report to:

• build support from senior management
• see what leading intranet teams are delivering
• get inspired
• learn from the experiences of others
• guide planning for your team’s next steps

The Intranet Innovation Awards celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets. Now in their fourth year, the awards have uncovered many innovative ideas from across the globe.

Winners this year: Bennett Jones (Canada), Airways Corporation (New Zealand), AMP (Australia), Arup (UK), Framestore (UK), IMF (USA), MITRE (USA), Omron Europe (Netherlands) and Shepherd and Wedderburn (UK).

The 163-page Intranet Innovations 2010 report shares the full results of the awards, including 15 extensive case studies of the winning entries and over 200 screenshots. Commended entries provide further insights and examples.

Read more

The awards are unique in that they focus on specific enhancements that add value, rather than intranets as a whole. This makes for a diverse range of winners, covering almost every aspects of intranets, and giving insight into the leading edge of intranets.

Congratulations to this year’s winners:

Platinum award winner

• BenNet – legal Precedents database
  Bennett Jones (Canada)

Gold awards winners

• Modular homepage, Fritter and more
  Framestore (UK)
• Air traffic control examinations database
  Airways Corporation (New Zealand)
• Discussion forums
  Arup (UK)
• Handshake
  Mitre (USA)
• Hub evolution
  AMP (Australia)
• All About a Country
  IMF (USA)
• MyShepwedd
  Shepherd & Wedderburn (UK)
• Customer ordering indicator
  Omron (Netherlands)

Commended entries

• Global Reports Center
  Coca-Cola Enterprises (USA)
• ZiggoNet stakeholders’ blog
  Ziggo (Netherlands)
• my.monash carpooling
  Monash University (Australia)
• Intranet launch marketing
  Rijkswaterstaat (Netherlands)
• Hospital waste directory
  University Medical Center Groningen (Netherlands)
• Arup Projects
  Arup (UK)

Read more

I-Gen encourages staff to come up with ideas that improve the way the department works and helps them drive their ideas forward. It provides the support and tools to convert ideas into proposals, including a dedicated intranet site; networks of coordinators and mentors to help proponents of ideas; and links to relevant documents and websites.

Sabre Holdings is one of the largest travel services businesses in the world, quietly connecting travel agents with airlines, as well as running major sites such as Travelocity.

Sabre Town, their enterprise social space, provides a range of key functionality that supports staff work. This includes a question-and-answer system that turns traditional knowledge management approaches on its head, resolves daily staff needs, as well as saving in excess of $500,000.

The 7 minute video covers:

• What is Sabre Town?
• What questions are being answered on Sabre Town?
• How is this different from traditional approaches?
• What were the business benefits?
• Advice for other organisations?

As always, full details and screenshots are available in Intranet Innovations 2009, the annual report that showcases the present and future of intranets globally.

NYK is one of the world’s largest shipping and transport firms, with 770 major ships sailing the oceans. In an incredibly competitive market, it is vital to quickly respond to industry changes and competitor moves.

To facilitate this, NYK established a wiki-based intranet news room that allows every staff member to share industry news and more. Hear about their philosophy, approach and the benefits this has delivered.

The 7 minute video covers:

• What are the business challenges for NYK?
• What is the NYK Newsroom?
• How is the wiki being used?
• Advice for other organisations?

As always, full details and screenshots are available in Intranet Innovations 2009, the annual report that showcases the present and future of intranets globally.

It’s an impressive list. When all laid out on Morris, the intranet, there is a list of over 300 major products, sold around the world. Stuck in the airport lounge waiting for her delayed flight, Sarah has time to browse through the product details in advance of her meetings later in the day.

From what she’s heard, it was a big project to bring together all the product information together in the one spot, but the payoff has been obvious. Opening up the section for one product, Sarah can see everything from original research and product development through to packaging and current sales figures. Real-time sales figures feed into this, and while sales are moving briskly in Western Europe, there’s a red flag against Brazil, where sales haven’t hit targets for the last 2 months.

Reading through the comments added by staff against the figures, it seems that their major rival has just cut their prices, eroding their market share. Several suggestions have been offered, including one from a front-line sales person that repackaging into smaller units might help to reach their target market better.

Sarah can also see the flow of customer comments as they come in. These are gathered by the call centre and tagged against the product, immediately appearing here and on the homepages of the product managers. The regular scan of social media spaces also feeds into this list. For more expensive products, follow-up customer satisfaction surveys are conducted, and then folded into the collection of consumer information.

For one product, it’s immediately clear that there’s a problem with customer satisfaction, with comments suggesting a gap between the marketing messages and product reality. There’s also a high rate of calls into the call centre, so the installation instructions aren’t working well. Sarah notes down both these points to raise at this afternoon’s meeting with the product and support teams. She could also dip into the team’s working areas, but that’s too much detail for an airport lounge.

There’s also a lot happening in the innovation area. Having been given access last week, Sarah dips into the list of R&D projects currently underway. One of them relates to the use of new materials technology to deliver radically new versions of products, including some in Sarah’s area. The project space is a hive of activity, with team members contributing ideas and test results, and working towards a major milestone.

The project has also spun off a number of related ideas, which sit in the innovation space. Some of these have been picked up by staff, often in ad-hoc groups from across the globe. These will be pursued in the “10% time” that the product teams have. There are also several projects that have been outsourced to external innovation brokers, with individuals and organisations competing for the cash rewards to deliver solutions.

What time was the next flight again? Sarah goes back to Morris to check on the details. Glancing over the summary, she’s still got enough time for the connecting flight, even with the delay. Booking the trip was surprisingly easy. As is common, there’s an arrangement with a third-party booking service, but this time the system was brought straight into the intranet. Much easier, and no need for yet another password.

Morris also knew what hotels she is allowed to stay in, based on her pay grade, and listed the matching options in the city she’s travelling to. Staff who have recently transferred there have also filled in a lot of details about the surrounding area, including the best restaurants (if you’re into Thai food!), nearby laundromats, and how to get about on public transport. Flipping between these details, Sarah picked a hotel that was a little bit further out, but had a nearby jogging track, and was still in 15 mins of the office on public transport.

Being her first trip, Morris also reminded her that she needed to organise travel insurance. Clicking on the link in the email, a pre-filled form awaited her, requiring her to only fill out a few extra details before submitting. Several days later, an email arrived with confirmation of her details.

The travel insurance details were also added automatically to her ‘corporate passport’, which brings together all her key details in a single location. This includes key phone numbers, her contact people in HR and IT, pay details, trip information, upcoming holidays, and more. Very handy when travelling, and just as useful when working in the office.

Right, enough browsing the intranet! Time to close the laptop and dash for the flight.

Principles demonstrated:

• Act proactively, not just reactively
• Deliver end-to-end business processes
• Put people at the centre
• Deliver a seamless user experience
• Cross boundaries

What are your thoughts on this future scenario?

When I was in San Jose for the KMWorld conference, I organised an awards ceremony for the US winners of the Intranet Innovation Awards. This also allowed me to do video interviews with a number of the winners, and this is the first to be released.

This 7.5 minute video shares an interview with William Amurgis from American Electric Power (AEP), on their ideas system that identified savings of $8 million in the first two months of operation.

The video covers:

• Why develop an ideas system?
• Solving business problems
• How was it developed?
• What were the business benefits?
• Can you give an example?
• Tips for other organisations?

If you would like more detail on the AEP entry, obtain a copy of Intranet Innovations 2009, the annual report that showcases the present and future of intranets globally.

Winning entries in 2009 include CRS Australia (Australia), IDEO (USA), IBM (USA), SunGard (USA/NZ), NYK Group (UK), Sabre (USA), COWI (Denmark), ChTPZ (Russia), Prophet (USA) and AEP (USA).

Every year it gets tougher to judge the winners, and the entries were particularly strong this time around. There is so much good stuff to share, and we’ll be blogging details on one winner per day for the next week or two.

The full details on the award winners can be found in the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report, which shares hundreds of screenshots and plenty of details. This is a remarkable resource for intranet teams, and there is something for every organisation.

(Note: for the first time, intranet teams in Australia and New Zealand can order a beautifully-bound printed book, and we’ve made it super-easy to order any of our products in Australian dollars.)

So, to the winners…

Platinum award winner

Workflow inbox and more
CRS Australia (Australia)

CRS Australia provides vocational rehabilitation services and assistance for people with disabilities, injuries or health conditions.

The CRS intranet, CRSNet, is a central channel for this dispersed organisation, and is tightly integrated with SAP. It provides detailed information and advanced functionality for staff and managers, wrapped within a seamless user experience. For CRS Australia employees, CRSNet is designed to be the single online operating environment.

Gold awards: core functionality

The Tube: people and project pages
IDEO (USA)

The Tube is IDEO’s intranet, a stylised, innovative online space designed purely around IDEO employees.

Every employee has a personal page that’s linked dynamically to their location, projects, project team members, skills, personal blogs and more. It’s a perfect intranet, directory, skill finder, blogging platform and social network, all wrapped up into one, seamless user experience.

w3 Toolbar
IBM (USA)

Several intranets, dozens of tools and difficulty in knowing which tool to use for which task — and where to find it.

This was a problem identified within a small business unit in IBM, where the sheer scale of the company’s infrastructure and information systems meant employees needed a faster method to find their most commonly-used tools.

Cue the IBM w3 Toolbar, a multi-functional web browser tool, tasked with cutting through the mass of systems and content and integrating tools such as tagging and file sharing to make life much easier for employees.

Skills Matrix
SunGard (USA/NZ)

SunGard is a major provider for financial systems and applications.

With a major change in organisational structure came a comparable change in the way the skills were managed. The existing system, a spreadsheet, quickly became unusable, and grew to over 90 spreadsheet pages.

In response, the intranet team created the online Skills Matrix. Built with usability in mind, and what might be deemed a ‘web 2.0 ethic’ of user ratings, open sourcing the data and more, this is a benchmark example of a skill-finding application.

Gold awards: communication and collaboration

NYK News Room
NYK Group (UK)

NYK Group’s business is global shipping and it’s and one of the world’s leading transportation companies with over 770 shipping vessels.

The NYK News Room is wiki-based, and thus multi-faceted in its content, subscription options and viewing opportunities. It provides numerous improvements over the existing information service used by NYK, and is cheaper and has a far more extensive ‘reach’ to employees.

Sabre Town
Sabre (USA)

Sabre Holdings is one of the largest travel products and services providers in the world.

Sabre Town is Sabre’s in-house-developed social network, which helped reconnect the organisation as it expanded globally, and began operating in almost 60 countries. Not only has Sabre Town saved the company money, with defined dollar savings, it’s delivered intangible benefits with improved staff engagement, communication and conversation throughout the organisation.

Gold awards: frontline delivery

Business collaboration portal
COWI (Denmark)

Faced with a lack of effective collaboration tools and inaccessible
shared drives when outside the organisation’s network, COWI deployed a Microsoft SharePoint-based document management and collaboration solution, customising it heavily to ensure it met the exact needs of employees, and the requirements of COWI’s own project methodology.

The result: powerful, embedded ‘project sites’ that connect employees across the world, and enable teams to adhere to long-held project processes and standards.

Mobile employee
ChTPZ (Russia)

ChTPZ, a metallurgical firm in Russia, implemented the ‘Mobile Employee’ service to enable faster and more effective communication among employees in offices and out in the field.

It’s a simple idea, just find the person you need in the directory, click within the directory to go to the Mobile Employee intranet page, type in your message and press ‘send’.

Gold awards: business solutions

Online performance evaluation system
Prophet (USA)

Prophet is a US-based global consultancy with a customer base of
Fortune 500 companies.

Prophet’s online performance evaluation and appraisal system is a centralised dashboard system that takes an often cumbersome, time-consuming process and streamlines and automates it. The result? A super-fast, super-easy feedback system that’s made life dramatically easier for all involved, whether requesting and gathering feedback, or ensuring all applicable staff members are contributing to the process.

Ideas Now
AEP (USA)

AEP is one of the largest electric utility companies in the United States.

The AEP intranet, ‘AEP Now’, is home to ‘Now Ideas’ — an online suggestion box and system where employees can offer ideas for business improvement, and fellow employees can rate the idea.

The result? Millions of dollars in potential cost savings, and so many good ideas that the project has been frozen while the best ideas are implemented. So, where’s your ideas system?

Further information

Full details on all these winning entries can be found in the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report, including high-resolution screenshots and examples.

Intuit Brainstorm was designed by employees operating as innovators, rather than as a tool for senior management to track the status of efforts. It was designed to meet the needs of these innovators. It enables innovators to build a team, get help, grow ideas, and collaborate. As a byproduct, it also tracks the status of efforts, but in a more accurate manner than its predecessor because of the increased participation. Here is a screen shot of the home page.

These are great solutions to have in place. How great? Let me drop a hint that this year’s Intranet Innovation Awards will contain a similar solution that has identified savings of $8 million. Pretty good I think!