Initial Thoughts on the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards

The Tube is IDEO’s intranet, a stylised, innovative online space designed purely around IDEO employees.

Every employee has a personal page that’s linked dynamically to their location, projects, project team members, skills, personal blogs and more. It’s a perfect intranet, directory, skill finder, blogging platform and social network, all wrapped up into one, seamless user experience.

via alexmanchester.com

Alex kindly shared a review copy of Step Two's 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards report with me. We've been talking on and off about it in advance of its publication and he assured me I would be very interested in some of the winners this year. Its a long report (nearly 200 pages) so I haven't had a chance read it in full! However, some highlights for me so far:

IDEO's 'The Tube' people-centred intranet.
Sabre Town - an in-house-developed internal social networking site.
NYK News Room - while it could look better, this is a good example of using an enterprise wiki (in this case Confluence) as a platform to develop a solution.

Sabre Town in particular offers a great success story because their social networking site has apparently reported "Demonstrable saving of up to $500,000 in 2008 alone". So much for the Enterprise 2.0 doubters? Well, yes and no - these appear to be savings achieved through reduced wastage or significant time saving. Of course, unless you implement something like Sabre Town you aren't going to know what you are missing out on until you do.

While I don't think they were particularly strong winners, it was interesting to see the inclusion of companies that were looking beyond the browser screen and integrating toolbar gadgets and SMS as part of their intranet solution. These are all good signs, although I'm hopefully of more innovation in this space in coming years.

I'll try to post up some more thoughts about these examples in the next week or so. In the meantime, Step Two are publishing more excepts, further insights and screenshots on their blog - or just buy the full report for yourself.

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Nov 18, 2009

Alex Manchester said...

Hi James, glad you're enjoying the report! It is pretty big at 200 pages or so, but well worth getting through. :-)

Regarding Sabre, their savings are actually quantifiable cost savings - they've avoided spending money they would otherwise have spent.

The example in the report was the finding of an existing Italian-speaking employee, who joined a project where otherwise a translator would have had to have been hired at a cost of several thousand dollars. This type of resource finding is a key component of Sabre Town (the full Sabre case study is available to read in the free exec summary of the report.

NYK have also shared a fair bit about the technical implementation of their wiki: http://lotocz.co.uk/?p=104

Looking forward to hearing more of what you think, especially people-centred/based intranets.

James Dellow said...

Re: Sabre - I probably didn't phrase that very well :-)
Its not that these aren't quantifiable cost savings, but rather a comment on the difference between specific savings around a particular process versus cumulative savings across a broad range of areas in the business. These broad cumulative savings are hard to predict in advance, which is I think where some people get stuck on the value of enterprise social computing. I've been ranting about this recently. However, you can often find stories that show you examples of individual mistakes and wastage that cost money that have happened in the past. You just need to extrapolate a little to understand the potential.

Nov 19, 2009

I see the distinction now, especially in light of the spreadsheets post (which is a worthwhile approach in itself). Definitely agree that this example was unpredictable in the details, although common in its results. Mapping out where and how money/a process has been unpredictably saved/improved is the precursor to replication of a process. With enough evidence and undertsanding of the individual components, we can begin to say with more confidence that certain things will work.

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