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]

Screenshot courtesy of UK Parliament

Mobile devices become ubiquitous in the consumer space, with “there’s an app for that” reshaping how people get access to information on the move. Up to now, however, the situation within organisations has lagged far behind.

In many cases, staff can’t even access corporate information from home, let alone on mobile devices. Thankfully this is now changing, and innovative organizations are now mobilising their intranets and corporate systems. This has a real impact for staff on the go, transforming intranets into essential tools which makes their working day easier.

Two very different organizations show the way.  In the UK Parliament, MPs are hardly ever at their desks. Now they can receive essential real-time updates of what’s happening in the chambers and committees directly to their phone, all wrapped up in a beautifully designed interface perfect for the mobile environment.

At Queensland University of Technology (QUT), staff and students are provided with a mobile interface to access key information, wherever they are on the campus. This includes exam results, photocopy credits, campus bus times, and breaking news.

This is one of the key themes to emerge from the 2011 intranet Innovations Awards, the annual global competition run by Step Two Designs. Now into its fifth year, the awards attracted over 50 entries showcasing some of most innovative intranets from all over the world.

James Robertson, managing director and founder of Step Two Designs, said “Three of our winners this year were superbly executed mobile intranet projects.  By absolutely focusing on the user and cherry picking only the applications and content that are essential when out and about, the intranet teams have delivered huge benefits with relatively little cost.”

Robertson continued “I expect there will be more mobile entries in next year’s awards.  With widely available connectivity and increasingly sophisticated devices, it is possible that mobile intranets will start to have more impact than their traditional desktop counterparts, particularly where the user population is out in the field or in the frontline.”

Beyond mobile access, innovative intranets do much more. The overall Platinum award winner for 2011 is Framestore, a UK-based animation studio who produce visual effects for movies, television and commercials. Other winners this year come from France, USA, Denmark and Australia.

To see the leading edge of intranets, and hundreds of screenshots from other intranets, obtain a copy of the Intranet Innovations 2011 report.

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

A tip to get you started: the Intranet Innovation Awards recognise individual improvements which benefit staff and the organisation. So you don’t have to have the perfect intranet, just a great idea implemented well.

There are lots of benefits to winning an innovation award. These include:

• a beautiful glass trophy
• international recognition
• invitations to speak at major conferences
• video interviews
• magazine writeups
• and more

But don’t take our word for it! These are some of the comments from last year’s winners when asked what the benefits were in winning an award:

Winning an Intranet Innovation Award is an achievement we’re very proud of and everyone involved feels their hard work has paid off. It’s helped raise awareness of our Intranet around the company and within our industry, and we’ll be gunning for another award next year!

Rangi Robinson, Framestore

In November, Arup collected two prestigious Intranet Innovation Awards at an event held in Washington as part of the 2010 KM World conference which included scooping Gold for the comprehensive overhaul of the Arup Discussion Forums – allowing staff to easily navigate, contribute to and participate in global discussion – and a commendation for Arup Projects. This is the first time in the four year history of the event that Arup had won an award. We announced the wins in our weekly global newsletter and were promptly met with much support from throughout the firm. For instance:

“The timing of your success at the KM awards is fantastic. We are submitting a bid to [a large government body] this Tuesday and we need to provide evidence of our knowledge management. Could you please send me a good photograph of someone receiving the award or a photograph of the award?”

So not only were they a valuable tool for winning more work, but the two awards underlined the quality of the intranet available to our staff worldwide and helped us celebrate its on-going development and improvement.

Adam Pope, Arup

Winning the award has had two main benefits for us: 1) Our team has gained credibility as a developer on functional and cost saving work flow systems – leading to more work for us; 2) It has made it easier to create a local network of other intranet teams to share ideas and best practice.

Richard Burdes, Airways NZ

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!)