by Bill Ives
January 12, 2011 at 3:17 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, intranet, knowledge management
Nielsen Norman Group has announced winners in their 11th annual contest for best intranets for 2010. In the announcement Usability expert Jakob Nielsen was quoted, “If there’s anything that has been overused, abused and hyped almost beyond the level of cliché, it’s ‘knowledge management.’ It might therefore be better to say that the winners in this year’s intranet design contest were very strong in ‘managing knowledge’ on their intranets. Employees are the ultimate knowledge resource, and the winning intranets provided features to transform their behavior into manageable knowledge. In particular, organizations used social networking—a natural inside the enterprise—to give employees practical and simple ways to communicate with one another and even change the way work is done at the organization.”
So if read this correctly knowledge management was mostly useless until social networking came along. While the introduction of social networking and other social applications has grealty increased the potential of knowledge management in my opinion, I would hardly say that KM was simply a cliché before their advent. You can set up siloed document repositories as a strawman for bad KM but when it is aligned with business processes I have seen a lot of value over the past 15 years. Having said this I do like the strong support for enterprise 2.0 concepts in this current report.
It is ironic that such weight is placed on social networking since social media was seen somewhat skeptically by the same group when the 2006 winners for best intranets were announced. The 2006 summary said that the winners “took a pragmatic approach to many hyped “Web 2.0″ techniques.” It also said. “Several winners have weblogs this year, but the blogs are restrained, emphasizing useful information instead of “what I did on my last date.” This is an anachronistic straw man as business blogs had been around for several years, getting high marks from Fortune, Business Week, and Harvard Business Review as early as 2005. Blog on.
The 2010 winners are described in detail in Nielsen Norman Group’s 433-page report entitled “Intranet Design Annual 2011: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets,” co-authored by Amy Schade, Jakob Nielsen and Nielsen Norman Group researcher Patty Caya. The report is available for download from the Nielsen Norman Group website. In alphabetical order, the 2011 world’s 10 best intranets are:
AMP Limited (Australia), a wealth management company
Bennett Jones LLP (Canada), one of Canada’s largest law firms
Bouygues Telecom (France), a telecom, mobile, fixed, TV, and Internet communications services company
Credit Suisse AG (Switzerland), a global financial services company
Duke Energy (US), an electrical power holding company
Habitat for Humanity International (US), a non-profit, non-denominational Christian housing ministry
Heineken International (The Netherlands), a leading brewer and owner and manager of a portfolio of beer brands
KT (Republic of Korea), an information, communications, and technology company
Mota-Engil Engenharia e Construção, S.A. (Portugal), a leading construction enterprise
Verizon Communications (US), a provider of wired and wireless broadband and communications services to US consumers, as well as of global business networking, data, and managed solutions to enterprises worldwide
There were no repeats from 2006 when Verizon competitor, Comcast, was named along with Volvo, DaimlerChrysler (nsme at the time), Microsoft, and others.
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by Bill Ives
November 25, 2010 at 12:59 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, intranet
Here my notes from the Intranets in 2015 session led by James Robertson at KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. James is the Managing Director - Step Two Designs. Here is the session description.
“How can we deliver great intranets if we don’t know where we’re heading? This powerful presentation outlines a vision for intranets in 2015, describing a day-in-the-life of how staff will work. Going beyond the technology aspects, this session explores the “enterprise experience” that we should be providing to staff and how to start delivering it today.”
James has been talking about intranets for a long time. He speaks with a lot of people about how to make then work. His site has over 250 articles that are available for free on his site. He does three new articles a month except for January.
Looking at today’s intranet issues can be better addressed by knowing what the future holds. He started with the first of two scenarios, a new employee, first day at work. First, she finds a desk and computer with an email waiting for her. It is from the intranet offering to help her get started. Someone in the audience said they wanted to work there.
She starts the intranet and finds a series of links on getting started. There are videos from other staff on things they wish they learned on day one. There are many induction tasks including updating her profile. She can add her own tasks. There is a space for collaborating. She can see the collaborative spaces and view the profiles of her team members.
There are product chats about the company’s various offerings, as well as competitors. At the end of the first day she has a good start on her new job. She has done some tasks and has an initial understanding of what is happening at the company and within its market.
In debriefing this scenario it was mentioned that much is happening behind the scenes. This is cool but there is a fine line between being cool and creapy, with too much “big brother.” James feels that intranets need to be proactive and take advantage of the information located around the enterprise.
James said that these features are not blue sky. Some of the features are already in place. For example, the Jansen-Cilag intranet allows people to manage their own IT assets (see ). The CRS Australia intranet has an inbox that collects to-dos for multiple areas. The IDEO intranet connects people to people.
Then James covered another scenario. The new employee is off to her first business meeting and has some downtime at the airport. She looks at the intranet and finds all the company’s products and many real time details around them: sales, customer satisfaction, etc.. Booking the trip was automated through the intranet. She saw the hotels for her pay grade and no others, restaurants with reviews, both by the company and outside on the Web, and information for joggers. The intranet noticed that this was her first trip so the company issues and policies are covered.
James said the important issue is the employee experience and not whether it is on the cloud or inside the firewall. He said that there are some tough issues in these scenarios but they are achievable. I would agree. James noted that eighty to ninety percent of the data exists so you just need to make it accessible and use it.
James offered some principles. First, content is not longer the center, people are. User centered design is the approach to use. I found this to be the case since the early 90s, if not before. I found that the degree of success for a project was directly related to how much the users were involved in the design and their needs were made the center of it.
Second – provide universal access, including mobile access for everyone. Enable access from home.
Third – create a seamless enterprise experience. Blur the line between systems. Make this capability a mandate for vendors.
Fourth – Offer end-to-end solutions. Focus on task completion and clarify and simplify. The simplification can generate a lot of ROI.
Fifth – Integrate into the business
Sixth – Crossing boundaries – Break down silos and create awareness of what is going on in the enterprise, as well as outside. Enable a transparent organization.
James moved to what we can do now when budgets are tight, management is cautious, technology can be clunky. First, create your own design and future scenarios. Design small but great solutions. Make sure you do something rather than just talk about possibilities. Remember intranet need to attractive, as well as functional.
It was very useful for him to close on some calls to action.
by Bill Ives
March 2, 2010 at 3:16 am · Filed under
intranet
Jane McConnell is an intranet strategy consultant based in France who has worked with intranets since 1998. She recently published her fourth annual Intranet trends survey and report. Data was collected from nearly 300 organizations worldwide between June and September 2009. Organizations range from under 5,000 to over 100,000 employees. The five major trends for the future of intranets covered in the 2010 report are summarized below.
The intranet is starting to become the entry point into the “workplace web” – the collection of resources and information needed by staff. This includes applications, intranet sites, specialized portals, team spaces, collaboration spaces and so on. This was the original vision for many intranets but rarely realized. The current evolution is from a fragmented workplace web to a hybrid one and finally to the end goal, a unified workplace web. In the “unified” workplace web, the intranet or enterprise portal is the front door to the organization’s information, business and collaborative resources and places. There is a ways to go as today only 15 percent of the survey participants have achieved a “unified workplace web”.
Team-orientation is rising as firms are starting to bring collaboration spaces inside the intranet. Today, the vast majority of organizations already have team places but they are usually not considered part of the intranet. These places sometimes become mini silos. Now as the way of working becomes more collaborative and enterprise 2.0 concepts spread, this is beginning to change.
A more people-focused approach is being adopted. In the past the intranet has traditionally been a place where organizations provides content for employees to read and use. Communication was primarily top-down. This is changing with the introduction of social media. I have found that advanced organizations are recognizing the need to be more people oriented. That was the case with the Booz Allen work where profiles are the foundation for their collaborative system.
Intranets are also becoming more real-time through chat, micro-blogging, and other tools. In addition, intranets are also becoming place independent as anytime, anywhere access grows through mobile devices and home access.
These are only some of the highlights. I certainly agree with these trends. You can see the complete report at Jane’s Net Strategy site.
