The fist annual Intranet Innovation awards celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets. Perkins Eastman is the first Gold award winner for communication & collaboration.

Perkins Eastman is a major architectural firm with a clear need to share knowledge between staff located in widely dispersed offices. Practice Area Communities (PAC) were setup on the intranet to share staff expertise, and exchange both explicit and tacit knowledge. This in turn helps drive innovation across the organization as a whole.

Top level structure for a Practice Area Community (PAC), showing the major resources and sections.

The purpose of each Practice Area Community (PAC) is to enable knowledge sharing between individuals; across project teams, studios, offices, and practice areas; and the entire international organization. The knowledge that is transferred at each of these levels enables Perkins Eastman to evolve into an industry leader.

Each PAC contains key information on a key subject such as “Senior Living” (illustrated above) and features information such as:

• Design practices
• Insights and Lessons Learned
• Project Lists
• Presentations
• Glossary
• Strategic Analysis
• Planning
• Etc.

The PACs are recognized by staff as a key source for information and knowledge. Each PAC is structured to serve as an ongoing educational and learning resource for all staff. The resources provided in each PAC are the sum of the collective wisdom of all staff that contribute and participate – strengthening the firm’s knowledge systems.

Each PAC area is maintained by up to three “Gatekeepers” who have been recognized by the firm as industry and practice area experts with extensive experience and knowledge.

Each Gatekeeper is encouraged to share their knowledge, and to facilitate the sharing of knowledge by other staff. A Knowledge Resource Team (KRT) member serves as a liaison to the Gatekeeper group, and together they ensure each PAC section of ORCHARD (the intranet) undergoes continuous improvement.

The PACs provide a wealth of knowledge, both explicit knowledge that has been codified as well as tacit knowledge exchange in real-time. Providing staff with multiple formats for knowledge sharing and continuous learning, they are provided additional means to innovate and consistently deliver award-winning projects.

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Global in nature, the Intranet Innovation Awards have uncovered many innovative ideas. Uniquely, these awards recognize individual intranet improvements, and not intranets as a whole. Fiat, this year's platinum winner, has used their 'Avanti e Veloci' web portal to help turn around the fortunes of their whole business. Other winners include:

• The Environment Agency
• City of Casey
• SunGard AvantGard
• Nycomed
• QBE

Read the article that provides a summary for each winner:

http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_iia2007/index.html

Obtain a copy of the full 115-page "Intranet Innovations 2007" report from Step Two:

http://www.steptwo.com.au/products/iia2007/index.html

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The Vanguard Group is one of the largest mutual fund companies in the U.S. with 12,000 employees and approximately $1.1 trillion in assets under management. Vanguard is a fairly wealthy and established company, to say the least.

Vanguard was recently honored by the annual InformationWeek 500 committee as the third best and “most innovative” company in the country. Powering this esteemed nomination was the unveiling of a new company portal with a massive $10 million price tag.  But the whopping price tag does deliver some impressive functionality as revealed by Chris Murphy in his InformationWeek article Vanguard Tests Web 2.0 On Employees And Customers Benefit):

·         Customizable and personalized home page (requires “15 minutes to customize”)

·         Federated search (powered by Autonomy) and access to the portal, Lotus Notes e-mail and databases, calendar, news feeds, and Oracle databases

·         Time-off and benefits, training and travel approvals

·         Employee workspaces (blogs and wikis to be rolled-out next year)

·         Employee directory listings show direct reports with Ajax-powered rollovers that allow the user the mouse over a listing to provide additional details and information on each person

“With no retail outlets, Vanguard's Web site is by far the largest channel for customer contact, far more than telephone and mail,” writes Chris Murphy in InformationWeek. “The company wants a site that measures up to the best of the Web, so it consciously uses its intranet as a test bed. In 2006, for example, Vanguard knew it was about a year away from wanting to use Ajax-enabled rich Internet applications for customer apps, so it experimented with them on the intranet.

Interestingly enough, like most applications and IT projects at Vanguard, much of the new portal was deployed by internal resources. Vanguard says they build about 70% of their own applications. In fact, Vanguard employs a massive IT force of 2,600 IT employees, plus approximately 300 contractors.

Vanguard says the intranet portal will save them about $10 million per year, but the business case “hinges on cutting wasted hours employees spend on tasks such as searching for information.”

That’s a pretty soft business case for a $10 million portal, but to each their own.

READ the complete article: Vanguard Tests Web 2.0 On Employees And Customers Benefit.

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: In the 80s and early 90s I was a big baseball fan. But the lockout of ’94 soured me and I’ve not been much of a fan. In fact, this year was the first year I can remember that I did not get out to a single game, nor did I ever watch a complete game on TV. But there was something about the Colorado Rockies amazing drive to the playoffs that had me tune-in to the big tiebreaker showdown between Colorado and San Diego last night… you simply don’t have to be a big baseball fan to appreciate the drama and glory of the match last night.

I’ve seen some big games and dramatic clinchers: I sat riveted and cheering the Joe Carter clinching home run for the Blue Jays in ’93; I watched Luis Gonzalez loop the winning single for the Diamondbacks in ’01; I saw Kirk Gibson deliver the big dramatics for the Tigers in ’84 and later for the Dodgers in ‘88. Last night’s Colorado-San Diego game deserves company with all of those big games. The story line, the lead-up, the play, the extra innings, the controversial conclusion… it had it all. A remarkable, remarkable night in sports history. Even if you don’t like sports, this story is worth witnessing…