Most of us are very familiar with the frequent even natural tension between communications, marketing and IT. Techies see the world far differently than communicators or marketers. The common denominator for these groups must be the user. In The Enterprise User Experience—Bridging the IT/Marketing Divide Bob Goodman aruges that the both techies and marketers understand the importance and the significance of not only the user but the user experience (UX):

“This user judgment day occurs not only for consumer products, but also, in the case of enterprise UX, for internal products as well. For example, employees may fail to embrace a new intranet, extranet, or business application, because it doesn’t really connect with the way they do their jobs. The UX approach moves product concepts through iterative cycles of progressive optimization by letting real live users road test more and more refined models of a product. By involving users in the product design process, UX professionals bring to their teams the benefits of foresight and insight into “the street” before a product even rolls out.”

Notwithstanding the importance of the user however the first-movers and leaders should not go unnoticed. Benchmarking leaders and those that have blazed trails that you are only starting on can provide excellent intelligence and ammunition for growing the value of your intranet, portal or external website. (Thanks to James Robertsonfor highlighting this issue).