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The intranet innovations I would like to see in 2009

Written by James Robertson, published October 24, 2008

Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets

Now that we’ve got this year’s Intranet Innovation Awards out of the way, my mind starts to turn to next year. Intranets are continuing to evolve and grow in scope, and this is what I’d like to see entered into next year’s awards:

  • Enterprise 2.0 functionality seamlessly part of the intranet. There are so many new ideas in this space, and I’d love to see these put into practice and used widely by staff, showing how they can change the way staff work.
  • Great examples of personalisation. This is something that the industry has been talking about for some time, but it’s hard to find examples that work for staff, are used widely, and demonstrate business benefits.
  • Delivery to mobile devices. We are now all carrying our Blackberries and iPhones, so it’s time to extend the reach of the intranet into the field and out on the road.
  • RSS as an enterprise news channel. The news box on the intranet homepage quickly runs out of puff when we increase the volume of news. Delivering multiple news channels via RSS provides an extremely interesting way of reaching staff.
  • Completing tasks on the intranet. This year’s Platinum winner, Fuller Landau, demonstrated the benefits of automating key business tasks on the intranet, but I’d like to see intranets go even further.
  • Integration of collaboration and the intranet. Instead of having the collaboration tools “over there”, I’m looking forward to seeing them integrated into the overall intranet user experience, with flows of content from local collaboration spaces to the global publishing platform.

Of course, these are just the personal interests of one of the five judges, and no guarantees of winning! There are also a hundred other ideas worthy of entering.

To make sure you don’t forget to enter next year, register your interest, and we’ll remind you when the awards open for entries. We’ll also prompt you two weeks before they close.

What innovations would you like to see win in 2009?

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2 Comments:

  1. Andrew Mitchell commented on October 24th, 2008

    A nice list James and always interesting to see examples of real use and value. I’m thinking a lot about intranet based business reporting/dashboards and personalising the delivery of that.

    FYI we’re using blogs as lightweight CMS for news and various other information flows -> RSS -> rendering on intranet AND via email subscription. People like it but not sure it would be easy to quantify the value though.

  2. Martin White commented on October 26th, 2008

    Thanks for starting this thread off James. It gas certainly got me thinking. Here are two suggestions.

    I’d like to see workflow intranets evolve. I don’t think that personalisation is ever going to be effective, for reasons too long to go into on this blog. But if I am (say) a project manager starting up a new project I’d like to be able to click on a link and the information that I need at that point in the process is brought up onto my screen. That includes some standard searches. It could be argued that this is role-based personalisation, but my experience is that people now perform many different roles. The constant is that they work through some well defined processes and I think that the intranet should be supporting these in a proactive manner.

    I’d like to see some form of certification emerge for intranet managers. Companies are unware of the skills needed to be a competant intranet manager when hiring, and there are no career development routes. Being an intranet manager is both lonely and career-threatening.