Notes and observations about the 2012 intranet innovation award winners

2012-09-28

Another year has passed and Step Two have released their annual intranet award winners. Its always interesting to poke around the list of companies.

An Elgg-based solution wins again

Mitre won an award from Step Two in 2010 for its Elgg-based employee network.

This year, Pleio, a customised version of Elgg developed by the Dutch government, also won an award.

Pleio: A social network for Dutch government on Prezi

Incidentally, an award winning Headshift Asia Pacific client that is based on Elgg also presented at Step Two's intranet conference earlier this year (PDF). We also deployed Elgg for a Government 2.0 Taskforce project in 2009, with great success and it was used to create a social network for the British public service too. If you've not heard of Elgg, maybe you should?

Climateworks is commended for its SocialText-based wiki

Very few social business platform vendors featured in the awards, but it was good to catch this winner in the list, who are a SocialText customer. The ClimateWorks Knowledge Exchange, an enterprise wiki, is a key component of their knowledge strategy. Perhaps challenging the myth that social is all about water cooler discussion, they use Socialtext for both collaboration and document management.

You can watch a recording of a SocialText webinar, featuring Sarah Nichols from Climateworks - the slides are also available:

Moving Beyond the Knowledge Base to the Social Knowledge Exchange from Socialtext

Incidentally, the NSW Department of Education is also a Socialtext customer (see below).

SharePoint, SharePoint and SharePoint (but with some social)

Lots of SharePoint winners in the mix (perhaps to many?):

Coca-Cola Enterprises - ThoughtFarmer profiled Jonathan Phillips on their blog, which provides some background on their SharePoint intranet (+ Salesforce Chatter - Neil Jenkins guest posted on Rachel Miller's blog in August this year about their experience with rolling out Chatter).

Chr. Hansen, who are also a IntranetPrisen 2010 winner (see this case study (PDF) about their SharePoint project).

Scott Corporation (see this case study about their SharePoint project).

Weston Solutions, also a winner in the World Wide Intranet Challenge (+ see Newsgator for their case study).

Stockland (+ see Newsgator for their case study).

(I suspect there may be more that I haven't identified)

Interesting to note that at least 3 of the 5 companies listed have some form of 3rd party social software extension in their SharePoint installation!

NSW Department of Education - put the effort in to get great results

The same team from NSW Department of Education has presented at both of Step Two's intranet conferences - first about Yammer (although they eventually they moved to Socialtext) and this year about their portal (which is based on LifeRay).

I2012 decinsight from Karina Smith

If you jump to slide 16, notice the size of the team involved in this project - which also included Meld Studios, who specialise in service design & customer experience (I know Iain and Steve). I think this case study really demonstrates the value of investing up front in the design process.

Enter

UPDATE: Russian online retailer, Enter, uses Jive (and possibly their Bunchball module) to provide a social intranet with 'gamification' features.

Via Storify.

The rest

A few of the others that caught my eye:

Judge Group - their intranet redesign has been profiled by J. Boye before, and their mobile intranet was also featured at the J. Boye 2011 conference (includes slides (PDF)).

After reading this about Heineken, I'm not sure about this being a 'social learning' case study but open to being convinced ("e-learning" and "social learning" aren't really concepts to mix together).

Finally, I'd like to give a special mention to Andrew from Urbis, who wins an award for a second time.

Observations

Clearly, you have to be in it to win it - for example:

Companies like Urbis, ARUP and Coca-Cola Enterprises have appeared numerous times over the years in these awards.

Others have been recognised by other awards - e.g. Weston Solutions, Chr. Hansen.

Getting out into the conference scene doesn't hurt either - e.g. Department of Education, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Judge Group.

In this respect it would be interesting to see a more diverse range of platforms powering some of these intranet innovations - because looking at the industry analysis and the companies I talk with, there is lots of competition out their for both traditional intranet and social intranets that isn't reflected here. (Maybe the issue is also about the industry - particularly in the US - not recognising themselves as working with 'intranets' too?)

Having said that, it is really great to see social and mobile intranet innovations getting profiled. Its significant that many of the winners also have intranets that support social features (Socialtext, Newsgator, Chatter, Elgg, Jive). The march of mobile and social into intranets is clearly unstoppable.