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© Copyright 2011, Step Two Designs Pty Ltd • www.steptwo.com.auintranets • usability • information architecture • knowledge management • content management

KMCOLUMN

NOVEMBER 2011

Intranet Innovations 2011: six key themes from this year’s awards

This year the Intranet Innovation Awardsare five years old. The global competition,run by Step Two Designs, has uncovered an-other set of great examples of innovativework from intranet teams worldwide. Col-lectively they give us a compelling glimpseof where intranets are at this moment intime, as well as an indication of where theyare heading.

In 2011 there were over 50 entries, resultingin:

• One platinum award winner: Framestore (UK)

• Nine gold award winners: Queensland University of Technology (Australia), UK Parliament (UK), Lafarge (France), Alcatel-Lucent (France), Lundbeck (Denmark), Malmö Stad (Sweden), ScottsMiracle-Gro (USA), Arup (UK), CRS Australia (Australia)

• Four commended entries: RPC (UK), Vancity (Canada), RSPCA Australia (Australia), CSIRO (Australia)

These excellent entries suggest a number ofkey themes, six of which are explored in thisarticle.

14 case studies, 200 screen shotsThe full annual Intranet Innovations 2011report features detailed case studies of all 14winning and commended entries, around200 intranet screen shots of the sites in ques-tion and articles from the judges. It’s availa-ble to purchase directly from the Step TwoDesigns website. At $89 we believe it repre-sents great value.

Here are the six themes we found.

Continuous improvement is keyAn outcome this year that genuinely sur-prised the judges was that previous winnersof the Intranet Innovation Awards havepicked up more prizes.

Our Platinum winner Framestore won a goldaward in 2010 for the company’s new intran-et platform, which included a highly config-urable homepage, integrated an existingwiki and introduced a micro-blogging toolcalled Fritter.

Similarly CRS Australia, a strong entry withits ‘Just In time content’ concept, previouslywon the Platinum award in 2009 with an in-genious set of business applications all inte-grated with SAP.

Perhaps the fact that these intranet teamshave repeated their success is not so surpris-ing. Teams and the approaches they take arecritical for successful innovation. At bothCRS Australia and Framestore, there hasbeen continuity in personnel and methodol-ogy between previous prize-winning inno-vations and their entries this year.

Successfully delivering innovative andhigh-impact projects inside organisations al-ways raises user expectations and the stand-ards o f the in t ranet t eam membersthemselves. If you deliver something of highquality, then everything going forward hasto be as good, if not even better.

Both these examples, as well as other win-ners in this year’s awards, strongly show thatleading edge intranets thrive when there is aculture of continuous improvement, oftendriven by the intranet team.

Having an organisational culture whichbacks innovation also helps. This is clear inthe creative and high-tech atmosphere atFramestore, where the majority of the userpopulation are artists working on highly

Continuous improvement is a driver for intranet innovation

Steve Bynghall is the editor andauthor of this year’s Intranet Inno-vation Awards Report. He is a free-lance intranet and collaborationconsultant and writer based in theUK. He was the Content Producerfor the IBF 24 2011 and is currentlyco-writing a book with Ross Daw-son about crowdsourcing.

Platinum Award winner Framestore is a computer animation house. The intranet team created a tool to project manage the visual effects they produce for movies such as the Harry Potter series. Built in-house and displaying data from a third party system, the company’s artists can access tabbed views of complex data about every scene and shot. (Top) They also have a list of personalised tasks on the intranet home page. (Bottom)

Intranet Innovations 2011: six key themes from this year’s awards • © Copyright 2011, Step Two Designs Pty Ltd • www.steptwo.com.au

complex computer animation for movies,TV and commercials. The relatively smallsize of the company (around 600 people)also means that there is a lack of ‘red tape’which can slow down implementingprojects.

Another key factor is having an accompany-ing platform that can easily incorporate im-provements and deploy new applications.For example Framestore deliberately de-signed its intranet to be able to simply de-ploy modules, which users can easily add totheir own home page as a series of widgets.In fact the intranet team have referred to it asa ‘framework which you can plug otherthings into.’

What’s also encouraging is that teams arelearning from their current projects and ap-plying this knowledge to future projects.The team at Framestore are already planningtheir next intranet module which will alsointegrate with a third party tool and play thelatest ‘shots’ in a video format. Another ex-ample of this is the analysis and findingsaround UK Parliament’s highly effective mo-bilisation of its intranet which has given it asignificant headstart in a project involvingtablet deployment.

Simple ideas, quick execution

Many of the innovations in this year’sawards are based on remarkably straightfor-ward ideas. These are not necessarily grandvisions or seven-stage complex plans, butthey are intelligent concepts.

CRS Australia sought to deliver up-to-dateand relevant content at the moment their us-ers needed it, generally during a transactionat some stage of a business-critical process.Malmö Stad needed a way to introduce per-sonalisation based on a user’s business unitand role, but they didn’t have the necessarydata. They introduced a simple form to askusers for the relevant information and thenused an equally simple cookie to point usersto the relevant content.

These ideas are not difficult to grasp. It’svery easy to see the benefits. This inevitablymeans that these projects are an easier sell tosenior management and other stakeholders.

These projects have also been heavily influ-enced by practical thinking, particularly inhow existing data has been used. For exam-ple both Framestore and CRS Australia uti-lised data in their solutions that was readilyavailable. They were aiming high, but whatthey were proposing was perfectly ‘do-able’.

This pragmatism also shows itself in the waythat solutions have been delivered. In someexamples the internal teams involved in theproject ditched their standard project meth-odologies to get things done.

This pragmatic thinking is closely related tothe agile nature of the projects in this year’sentries. Most of them have been done in verytight time frames – mainly less than fourmonths, most in a matter of weeks.

Some of the deadlines were down to neces-sity, but it also appears speed helps keepprojects focused on results and maintainmomentum. It seems the very opposite of theheavy investment required to do an energy-zapping upgrade of your entire platform.

This approach only emphasises the fact thatthe ‘Ingredient X’ that has made theseprojects successful is the driven and moti-vated teams, not the technology. The teamsoften came up with the ideas, designed thesolution and then worked hard and fast toimplement them.

Mobility is here and it has high impact

For the past two years we have been predict-ing that mobility was going to be a keygrowth area for intranets. This year – at last– it has finally arrived! Three of our winningentries are mobile projects, all of which havehad significant impact. In particular the mo-bile intranet projects at the Queensland Uni-versity of Technology (QUT) and the UKParliament both involve user populationswho are rarely deskbound. Being able to ac-cess information while on the go via a hand-held device has genuine impact.

Organisations have been slow to implementmobile intranets. The vast majority of com-panies are not even at the planning stage.This is partly due to the challenges arounddesign, a lack of in-house experience in in-tranet teams and also perhaps a perceptionthat a mobile intranet is a ‘nice to have’ rath-er than an essential business application.

Perhaps the most striking outcome whichemerges from all three entries is that mobili-ty can have a real impact on the intranet as awhole.

Many of the innovations are based on very simple ideas


Queensland University of Technology (QUT) cherry-picked content for their mobile intranet QUT Virtual Mobile which would be useful for students and staff when they were on the go. The campus bus timetable has been a popular feature. When the mobile device is held landscape the bus map is also displayed.


At the UK Parliament the proportion of MPswho used the intranet every day leapt from48 per cent to 75 per cent once it was mobi-lised. At QUT the mobile intranet was evenseen by prospective students as an indicatorthat the university was the type of progres-sive place where they wanted to study.

In short mobile is not a ‘nice to have’. It is adelivery channel in its own right that will beused by an increasingly mobile user popula-tion. Work is no longer deskbound, so in-tranets need to adapt.

Critical for a successful mobile implementa-tion is a thorough knowledge of the userpopulation. All three entries took their usersas the starting point for their projects ratherthan their existing intranet.

The teams carefully selected applicationsand content to take over to the mobile envi-ronment that would make a real differenceto the users. It was not a ‘desktop lite’ intran-et they were delivering. The UK Parliamententry summed this up perfectly when theysaid they wanted to make the intranet workharder for their MPs, not the other wayround.

Designing for the mobile environment is alsokey. Not everything is suitable for such asmall screen, and there are also unique fea-tures to take advantage of. For example QUTVirtual’s bus map appeared with the timeta-ble when the device was rotated horizontal-ly. It was also sensible to design the solutionas browser-based, allowing for compatibilitywith a wider range of devices.

Clever use of data delivers real value

One of the elements we have seen in the en-tries this year is the use of different combi-nat ions of data to improve the userexperience.

As a general rule, there are mountains of un-used and unextracted data which sit deepwithin organisations, representing opportu-nities to exploit for both CRM and businessintelligence (BI) purposes. While none ofthis year’s entries covered this, we did see ef-forts to improve search and deliver personal-ised content, both very effectively.

One of the barriers for many organisations isthat it is just too costly or difficult to get tothe data in the first place. Two entries de-tailed how they had overcome this problemand described the process of getting valuabledata to enable improvements. We’ve alreadymentioned how Malmö Stad simply got us-ers to fill out a form to drive personalisation.A commended entry, Vancity, asked users torate their search experiences, also via a sim-ple form. This happened just after eachsearch was completed, with the informationcollated used to improve findability. Thesestraightforward approaches both had highadoption.

Once you have the data, it can sometimes beused cleverly. Perhaps the best example ofthis is CRS Australia. Armed with theknowledge of which documents a user hasvisited, what users are doing at a given time,which documents are related to a particularprocess and the last time each document hadbeen changed significantly, the company de-livered its ‘Just in time content’ solution.

When a user carries out a process via the in-tranet such as booking travel by completinga form, a list of relevant links to appropriatedocuments now appears in a separate box.

In isolation the information used to bringabout this innovation does little to improvethe user experience. Bring it all together andthe outcome is a major business benefit –both saving time and reducing risk.

The centre of gravity is now social

In 2010 we declared that basic social toolswere now standard in intranets and were nolonger innovative. We have continued to seethis trend, but what is clear from the entriesin this year’s awards is that the ‘social’ ele-ment is starting to gradually change thewhole tone of the intranet.

For the past 20 years or so the old rigid officestructure based on hierarchies and ‘com-mand and control’ has been gradually frag-menting. Ties have been taken off, the wallshave come down to go open plan, and nowworkplace technologies have started to imi-tate some of the experiences from the con-sumer world.

Work is no longer deskbound so intranets must adapt Combining the right data can

bring major business benefits


Lundbeck’s LinkedIn connector allowed users to voluntarily import their LinkedIn profile into the internal employee directory and regularly update with any changes. The result is improved expertise location and more up-to-date profiles at virtually zero cost.


Within this larger context, the most obviouschanges to intranets have been the prolifera-tion of social tools and the appearance ofuser-generated content on the home page, ei-ther in the form of comments or actual sto-ries submitted.

In some respects this has highlighted theself-importance and over-formal style ofmany corporate communications. Now thecentre of gravity of intranets is not aboutcompany news, it’s much more informal. It’sabout the people, what they do, and howthey communicate.

We can see this in many of the entries in thisyear’s awards. For example Arup created anovel intranet microsite to support theirAmazing Race initiative, set up to benefit theSportsAid charity. Here competing teamscould log their real world exercise effortswhich were then displayed as placeholderson a virtual world map, charting teams’progress across different continents. The mi-crosite gave a vibrancy to the initiative andreally helped to channel the friendly rivalrybetween teams.

Social tools are also being used more liberal-ly. This is perhaps most marked in the adop-tion of the video sharing platform ALU TV atAlcatel-Lucent. There the platform is now inwhat the organisation describes as its ‘DNA’.Some of the research scientists have usedthis as the natural platform to share knowl-edge about their activities.

Blending the inside and outsideThis year’s awards have shown solid exam-ples of how bringing the external world intothe intranet can deliver major benefits.

Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeckused the LinkedIn API to develop a clever

but very simple device to bring in LinkedInprofile data to act as its internal expertise di-rectory. This not only provided instant richcontent but also saved staff considerabletime by not having to create and then main-tain two overlapping professional profiles.

As more third party tools – sometimes host-ed or in the cloud – make decent APIs avail-able, in-house teams will be able to furtherdevelop innovative solutions that suit theneeds of their organisations.

What is more unusual about the Lundbeckexample is that it also brings externally fac-ing content into the intranet.

There is an even more pronounced exampleof this at ScottsMiracle-Gro. Here the intran-et team took a mass of content about thefirm’s consumers, much of it externally fac-ing or generated, and saturated the intranetwith it for a sustained period. This contentincluded customer personas and recordingsof live calls to the firm’s call centres.

This was a real campaign to create internalawareness about its external customer-base,an idea which will bring various commercialbenefits to the firm, some of them intangible.

In a world where social media has createdopportunities for direct dialogue betweenfirms and their customers, the intranet doesnot necessarily have to be the internal-facingenvironment it has traditionally been.

Looking towards 2012So the big question is, can you do better? Of-ten intranet teams themselves don’t recog-nise they’ve done something truly special. Ifin reading this article one of the winnersechoes one of your own initiatives in anyway then please do consider entering nextyear’s awards. We’re open for business againin April 2012.

Get the case studies and screen shotsYou can purchase the full Intranet Innova-tions 2011 report online:

www.steptwo.com.au/products/iia2011

It’s about people, what they do and how they communicate

www.steptwo.com.au [email protected]•

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