Building a successful intranet requires an enormous amount of work, and very skilled and capable individuals. To be truly innovative, as is the case of Perkins Eastman, winner of the first Intranet Innovation Awards - Gold Award for communication & collaboration an intranet team has to truly understand the employee audience and deliver superlative content and tools that meet their expectations.

Perkins Eastman won the first Gold Award (see Intranet case study: Perkins Eastman), on the strength of creating an innovative series of online Practice Area Communities (PAC). The PACs are designed to enable knowledge sharing between individuals; across project teams, studios, offices, and practice areas; and the entire international organization.

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.

If you have some truly innovative tools or features on your intranet then I would encourage to apply to this year’s Intranet Innovation Awards – now open for submissions, which must be received by May a6, 2008. Full details on the awards (including the entry form) are at: http://www.steptwo.com.au/iia/  

The Intranet Innovation Awards are global awards that celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the design and delivery of intranets. Created by Step Two Designs of Australia The Intranet Innovation Awards are truly global awards, supported by a network of intranet-savvy organisations from the US to the UK, Europe and beyond.

All intranet teams are encouraged to enter their innovative approaches to the design or delivery intranets. This may be may be an entirely new piece of intranet functionality, or a good idea implemented particularly well. The awards recognise individual intranet improvements, and not intranets as a whole.

Submissions are received and judged based on four categories:

• core intranet functionality
• communication and collaboration
• frontline delivery
• business solutions

Winners will be showcased in the Intranet Innovations report, as well as in articles, YouTube interviews, online presentations, international conferences and major industry journals.

See last years winners:

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

Find out how to win an award presentation:

   http://www.slideshare.net/jamesr/how-to-win-an-intranet-innovation-award/

Watch video interviews with last year's winners:

   http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=JamesRobertsonAu

“When properly rolled out, social media and Enterprise 2.0 tools can help companies meet their No. 1 internal communication goal — engaging employees,” said Michael Rudnick, global intranet and portal leader at Watson Wyatt (see Social Media: The Next Frontier In Employee Communication).

“Instead of simply mass e-mailing information or posting to an intranet in hopes employees will see it, social media tools help employees actively participate in creating and sharing information. This shift to employee-generated content has resulted in employees’ becoming more engaged online.”

Michael is a pretty smart guy and he’s bang on. As he and his Watson Wyatt clients can attest employee communications (internal communications) is a synchronous or two-way street that requires active participation and dialogue between management and employees. The new Enterprise 2.0 or Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis are excellent tools for promoting this dialogue.

And yet, the adoption rate of social media tools within the enterprise continues to be startlingly low despite all the press and fanfare of the past 3 years.

Writer Nic Patton rightly asserts, in his article the article Employers must learn to love social media (Management-Issues.com), “Instead of trying to crack down on workers' use of new social media and Web 2.0 technology, employers should be embracing it as a way of creating better workplace communities, engagement and communication.”

Rudnick says these concerns are reminiscent of the productivity fears raised, and subsequently disproved, when the Internet was introduced into the workplace in the mid-1990s. The way for employers to address these concerns is to do just as they did 10 years ago — setting clear guidelines for acceptable use while adopting social media for a productive, internal purposes.

In Your employees love to surf porn, among other things I highlighted far greater concerns and risks than those posed by social media – namely surfing porn and general goofing around by employees. If staff can find ways to do this, what makes anyone think a wiki, which is self-policing by the entire employee population, is any worse?

Verizon has hundreds of discussion forums, blogs and wikis that are entirely self-policing and they’ve never had to censor or remove any content or would-be inappropriate postings (see Verizon's Digital Workplace). Why would your organization be any different?

Prescient Digital Media has just launched a new Intranet 2.0 service for those companies looking to examine, plan and rollout new Enterprise 2.0 tools. The offer includes:

• Requirements analysis
• Intranet 2.0 plan
• Blogs and wiki policies
• 1-2 trial wikis (with several options, features and content focuses)
• 1-2 trial blogs (with several options, features and content focuses)

If you’re interested in this new Intranet 2.0 service, please contact us directly (through the website) or give me a shout at 416.926.8800. 

UPCOMING WEB 2.0 & INTRANET 2.0 EVENTS:

Southeast Asia:

If you’d like to learn more about Intranet 2.0 and Web 2.0, and you’re in the Southeast Asia area (kiwis and aussies welcome too!), then you should definitely attend my half-day workshop on Web 2.0 as part of a three-day workshop in the 2008 Deploying First-Class Web Content Management For World-Class Websites (Ad Astra) in Hanoi, Vietnam from April 23 – 25.

I’ll be repeating the workshop April 28 – 30 in Jakarta. These workshops will be three full-days and promise a lot of learning, examples and hands-on work. To register for either please phone (65) 6334-9828 or email sales@adastra.com.sg

North America:

My colleague Carm Porco is chairing the 2008 Social Media Summit Canada Conference (Advanced Learning Institute) in Toronto, ON from March 31 - April 2, 2008. Three days of Web 2.0 best practices, case studies and learnings for which you can Register Online.

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