(SAN JOSE, CA) While an innovative intranet may be cool, and look great, a truly innovative intranet delivers true value and advances an organization's standing in its industry.

The Intranet Innovations 2009 report celebrates the winners of the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards, produced by Step Two Designs, sharing remarkable ideas from across the globe.

Intranet Innovation Award winner, SabreTown (Sabre's social networking for employees)

Winning entries include intranets from all over the World including:

• CRS Australia (Australia)

• IDEO (USA), IBM (USA)

• SunGard (USA/NZ)

• NYK Group (UK)

• Sabre (USA)

• COWI (Denmark)

• ChTPZ (Russia)

• Prophet (USA)

• AEP (USA).

The Intranet Innovations Awards celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets.Now in their third year, the awards have uncovered many innovative ideas from across the globe. Use these ideas to gain senior management support and to deliver an ever-better intranet.

For example, AEP, a US-based electric utility have created an online ideas system that has identified $8 million in savings, $2 million in the first month alone.

With winners across four categories (core functionality, communication and collaboration, frontline delivery and business solutions), there are valuable ideas for every intranet team.

The 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report shares the full results of the awards, including screenshots and details of the winning entries.

For more information:

• Winners at a glance

• Table of contents

• Reviews & feedback

• Global supporters

• Licence conditions

• Previous year’s winners

• Enter the 2010 awards

Technorati Profile

Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) helps organizations around the world reduce the costs and risks associated with information protection and storage. The Company offers comprehensive records management, data protection, and information destruction solutions along with the expertise and experience to address complex information challenges such as rising storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain has 20,000+ employees and is a trusted partner to more than 120,000 corporate clients throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and the Pacific Rim.

The following is a summary of the “Delivering a high-performing intranet (Case study with Iron Mountain)” intranet webinar on May 28, 2009, with Cathy Mcknight and Cheryl Travis.

6 stages of project management (Cathy Mcknight, Prescient Digital Media):

1- Enthusiasm

2- Depression

3- Panic

4- Search for the guilty

5- Punishment of the innocent

6- Rewards for the non-participants

Planning:

• “Failing to plan is a plan for failure.”

• “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

• “Ensuring you have key planning documents in place (be it the style guide, or content plan)... it's absolutely critical, and its saved my (intranet) project in many ways,” Cheryl Travis, Iron Mountain
  
  

Planning involves understanding

• business needs

• functional needs

• the right technology needs

• resources (internal and external)

• budget

Planning is done – now what?

Governance

• Governance structure

• Roles and responsibilities

• Supporting documentation

Communications

• Engaging leadership

• Engaging content owners & publishers

• Pre-launch employee communications

• Launch

• Ongoing communications (keeping momentum)

“We certainly need to engage leadership because frankly these are the people that fund the intranet,” Cheryl Travis, Iron Mountain

Content

• Content audit

• Content ownership

• Approvals and publishing

• Creating and repurposing

• Translation

• Archiving

• Reviewing and updating

Technology

• System requirements

• Resource requirements

• Ongoing support

(Note: Iron Mountain uses SharePoint for their intranet, Scout)

Site Build

• IA

• Wireframes

• Design

“For information architecture (IA) and wireframes you can't rely on your own internal team because they live the company everyday,” says Cheryl. “You want the IA to live no matter how your organizations changes. To have a 3^rd party to structure your IA is critical.”

Lessons learned at Iron Mountain

• Engage content owners at the start

• Rely on your independent resources

• Trust your sixth sense

• Keep communications lines open

“The sooner you communicate with them (content owners), the better,” Cheryl Travis, Iron Mountain.

The intranet gap

“What the business wants and what IT delivers can be two different things,” Cathy Mcknight, Prescient Digital Media. “An intranet is a process, not an event.”

“Its really good to have an outside expert to apply best practices,” says Cheryl “They have the clout and experience to do this (Prescient Digital Media).”

Tony Byrne, CMS Watch:

• SharePoint is part product, part platform, part ecosystem – a collection of technologies that have varying degrees of finish

• Under-reported and under-appreciated dimension of SharePoint: built solidly on (almost) latest .NET platform

• Be cautious of developer/integrator enthusiasm

• Keep Implementation of SharePoint Simple (KISS)

• Embrace configuration, some customization and integration, avoid extension (e.g. building custom applications, etc.)

• The latest marketing from Microsoft is “to really finish or complete MOSS you should look to external partners.”

• Oxcite, 3^rd party open source blog tool for .NET (not SharePoint)

• Just because a firm is a Microsoft partner, doesn't mean they have SharePoint expertise

Cautions:

• Some MS partners / vendors are in over their heads

• Not all are experts in all SP services

• Temptation to over-engineer

• Experienced integrators are in high-demand

Caveats:

• Test performance, reliability, and security features carefully

• Contrast software with "consulting-ware" (developed once for a client and re-sold)

• Remember: its not just another module, but another vendor

• Many partners fervently hope that MS will buy them, but Redmond typically recreates rather than acquires

• This can be very inconvenient for you down the road with MS upgrades SharePoint

Technorati Profile

IKEA U.S. has 37 stores, with over 12,000 co-workers; an employee audience that is both geographically dispersed, and has limited capacity to connect to the intranet. However, a challenging retail environment with a dispersed target audience and a limited attention span has not daunted the IKEA intranet team from focusing on the bottom line: decreasing costs, and increasing sales.

1. An emphasis on the power of people.

2. Decentralization works!

3. The Intranet is part of a total information landscape.

4. It’s good to be a passionate fanatic!

5. We are obsessed with impacting the bottom line!

The last philosophy 'obsession' with the bottom line has also served them well – leading to increased sales, and cost savings of more than $500,000 per year:

• PAPER COSTS = $192,000

• STREAMLINING PROCESSES / SELF-SERVE TRAVEL PROCESS SAVES $4,590

• MODERNIZING COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES VIDEO CONF to WEBEX = $90,000

• SELF-SERVICE HR = $219,000

The intranet is particularly focused on supporting the sales organization; especially sales events and the monthly “seize the day” sales. In particular, the intranet team delivers content that is highly focused on sales events with:

• Photos

• Stores “reporting in” with lots of co-worker quotes

• The good and the bad

• Employee discussion boards

• Sales number & metrics

Demonstrating their success in covering their big sales events, IKEA has consistently exceeded its sales goals since the third sales event proactively targeted by the intranet team.

To learn more about the IKEA intranet, and other top-rated intranets showcased at The Intranet Insider World Tour Live (New York, April 16 – 17). Register now for the Intranet Insider World Tour LIVE (only $700 for 2-days of jam-paced learnings).

Technorati Profile

“Sprint Nextel offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline communications services bringing the freedom of mobility to consumers, businesses and government users. Sprint Nextel is widely recognized for developing, engineering and deploying innovative technologies, including two wireless networks serving nearly 51 million customers.”

Intranet: i-Connect

HQ: Kansas City

Owner: Communications

Vision

“Always on, always accurate, always easy…wherever you need it.”

Purpose

The online home for fast, easy access to the essential Sprint tools, information and personal connections you need.

Sprint intranet home page, i-Connect

Intranet Success Standards

• Usage: The primary resource for internal Sprint information

• Content: Content is relevant, accurate and updated

• Navigation: Navigation is simple and associates quickly find what they are looking for

• End User Engagement: End users participate in the process of updating content and recommending changes
  

• Client/Business Partner Relations: Clients and business partners entrust us as the stewards of i-Connect and its users
  

• Overall Satisfaction: End users are satisfied

Survey Results Key Findings: Satisfaction

“In the last six months, how satisfied have you been with i-Connect as your online

home for fast, easy access to the essential Sprint tools, information and personal

connections you need?”

• Search

• Navigation (Department Pages, My Work & Our Company)

• Consolidation/better integration of web tools

• Log-In

• Customization

• Outside sources “scoop” internal news on occasion

Key Intranet Features:

• Comprehensive news center

• Blogs

• Discussion forums

• Project sites

• Company calendar

• My profile (my site)

To learn more about the Sprint intranet, and other top-rated intranets showcased at The Intranet Insider World Tour Live (NYC April 16 – 17). Register now for the Intranet Insider World Tour LIVE (only $800 for 2-days of jam-paced learnings).

Some of the other top rated intranets being showcased at this year's conference:

• Sprint Nextel

• Con Edison

• IKEA

• Siemens

• IBM

• Deloitte

• Thomson Reuters

• And more!

Technorati Profile

BT's employee podcast center on the intranet, Podcast Central

• Wikis have grown at exponential rates to more than 750,000 wiki pages (the vast majority of which are dedicated to business issues, adds Richard)

• Thousands of employees are blogging

• Countless executives and managers are podcasting & webcasting (even vlogging)

• Thousands are connecting on the intranet social networking site, MyBT

• 500,000 Team Sites have sprung-up using Microsoft SharePoint and Confluence (a service dubbed BT Collaborate)
  
  

BT is quiet about the expense of these tools but Dennison says that most of the social media tools were built on the cheap internally using open-source or existing software (SharePoint and Confluence are exceptions). Of course the business case to move to social media was built on one of need, rather than ROI, and the value is self-evident. “Using technology to break down traditional boundaries encourages a culture that reaches out rather than locks out, and that is something that the Digital Generation is ideally equipped to do,” adds Richard², who told me himself on a recent trip to jboye08 in Denmark that ROI is “overrated."Despite the success, many naysayers openly muse about the deleterious affects of social media on employee productivity. What if, for example, an employee spends hours on Facebook? My response to this valid concern is my typical response: “What if they spend hours chatting on the phone? Or spend their break time snorting elicit drugs in the bathroom?”

While care and planning should not be thrown to the wind, employees should be judged on results and not the clock. Results aside, Dennison is quick to quip, “If we can't trust them then we have to ask ourselves why we are employing them.²” Touché!

For those with the temerity to pick-up the intranet 2.0 torch and to run the extra mile required to adopt social media, Richard offers a number of lessons that should be ignored at your peril¹:

• Focus on value not risk!

• Start anywhere … start immediately

• Start small and build slowly – follow the energy of yes through the network

• We learn what works by doing the work … so …

• …let users try as early as possible – ‘warts and all’ – succeed or fail quickly … and cheaply!

• Engage legal/HR/security early… and emphasise evolution not revolution

• Have realistic expectations … the intranet is not the internet!

• Harness the enthusiasm of the enthusiastic … especially if senior

• Sometimes … ‘the only form of transportation is a leap of faith’!
  
  

SEE THE BT CASE STUDIES & SCREENSHOTS:

Case Study: BT, digital generation, Career Innovation Group, 2008

BT Web 2.0 adoption case study

Read Richard Dennison's excellent blog on his work at BT

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