The Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) has released their Intranet Design Annual 2006. Headed by the king of usability, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, NNG claims this year’s winners to be the best intranets of 2006.
The report does feature some great intranets including one of the World’s best, IBM’s W3 (see Intranet World Tour: IBM leads the World ). However, the judging is highly suspect, reliant on volunteer form submission. How could you determine whether an intranet is good or not without actually seeing it and clicking through it? Well apparently a one-sided voluntary form submission with a couple of screenshots is enough for NNG. (If I tell you to fill out a form for an award, are you going to give me the full story or tell me what you want to hear?).
Unfortunately, the Design Annual focuses on design and usability. Sadly, Nielsen et al have yet to figure out that an intranet’s design (look-and-feel) is not a requisite for success. Design is in fact, the least critical of all they key intranet mandatory assets (see The Nexus of Intranet Success). Anyone who works on or manages an intranet knows that the aspects that truly determine success include people, process, governance, standards, resources, content and tools. Even usability accounts for only about 15% of an intranet’s total value to an organization.
Nonetheless, the report does show some good screenshots and some good examples of the dos. This year’s winners include:
- Allianz
- ALTANA Pharma AG,
- Bank of Ireland Group,
- Capital
- Merrill Lynch,
- METRO Group,
- O2,
- Staples,
Unfortunately all the winners are big companies (median size: 62,500 employees) with big budgets. And 4 of 10 are financial service companies. If you can read such a report with a huge grain of salt, however, and you can stomach the US$148 price, then it is interesting fodder. Heck, I bought a copy.
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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media