World's Best Intranets Give High Regard to Social Networking and Collaboration

Business Wire| January 05, 2009

In an earlier article titled Intranets as Social Networks I described a little about our Intranet concept planning and how social networking al la Facebook came to be part of our software development plans. I also quoted from a press release regarding the latest Nielsen Norman Group Intranet survey. Here is that press release in full for those that are interested.

Social networking, which has steadily been inching its way into the enterprise the last few years, has now firmly taken root in top intranets, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen whose user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group today announced the winners of its ninth annual intranet design contest. this year saw substantial increases in the use among top Intranets of social networking and collaboration support features.

"Social networking ideas pioneered on the open Internet are being applied today to intranets not just for the sake of offering the latest and greatest features, but because they deliver true business benefit, the most important of which is allowing employees to share information and knowledge more easily, and in some cases, bring more personal information into the workplace, promoting stronger connections among employees," said Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group. "As a testament to how important and helpful this movement has become, every winner in our contest this year offered one or more social features."

The most prevalent among the social networking elements added to this year's top intranets were the Facebook-like features offered in the employee directories to enrich the employee profiles. One intranet offered an "In Common With You" section to highlight common interests when a user views a colleague's profile. Another organization allows employees to add personal videos to the corporate TV network in something of an enterprise YouTube. The number and type of blogs also increased this year over previous years and now include not only CEO and leadership blogs, but also employee blogs.

Collaboration spaces also increased. Besides wikis and document and task handling, several of the winning intranets added spaces in which employees can broadcast requests for help or input from colleagues, marking them as "urgent" when necessary and "solved" once the issue has been addressed.

"Our Intranet Design contest has given us the rare privilege over the last nine years of taking an inside look at the best-of-the-best intranets, and we can say without question that the top intranets have evolved well beyond simply hosting HR manuals and now play a recognized, strategic role in supporting work processes and increasing business efficiencies," said Kara Pernice, managing director of Nielsen Norman Group.

The 10 organizations with winning intranets span six industries and are based in six different countries, plus one from an organization that is not headquartered in any individual country. Their employee populations average 37,500 people, with the smallest being 3,200 employees. The average size of the teams managing these intranets is 14 members.

Reference:
"The World's Top Intranets Put Social Networking and Collaboration Center Stage." Business Wire. 2009. Retrieved June 15, 2009