I have been asked a few times why I decided to set up the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). The seed was sewn when I attended an intranet session a few years back called 'Best practice intranets'. At this session, intranet managers from 3 or 4 different organisations presented case studies about their intranets.
While some of the characteristics of these intranets were impressive and the case studies were interesting & valuable, I couldn't help but think, 'Why are these intranets best practice? Who has decided that they are the best? What evidence is there to support this claim?'. I discovered that there was no evidence, that the term 'best practice' was not being used in the literal sense, and that a session title simply called "Good intranet case studies' would have been more accurate (though perhaps not as compelling).
How are intranets currently evaluated?
I did some more research on how the most effective intranets could be identified and discovered that there were organisations that did in fact rate intranets and identified those that were the 'best'. These organisations provide expert evaluations of intranets - in other words, highly experienced intranet practitioners evaluate an intranet based on well defined criteria about what comprises a good intranet and then rank each intranet against this criteria.
If intranets were movies, then these rating systems would be like the various award ceremonies such as the Cannes International Film Festival or the Academy Awards. These Intranet awards are a very valuable source of information and can be a great source of inspiration for other intranet managers.
What about the intranet end user?
After reviewing these approaches to identifying best practice intranets, I felt that a mechanism that allowed intranet end users to also give their opinion about their intranet could be valuable to intranet managers. Kind of like asking someone who has been to a movie, what they thought about it (ie this would be the equivalent of the box office).
For those new to this blog, the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) allows intranet end users to evaluate and comment on their own intranet and then for these responses to be compared against other participating organisations. This makes it possible to identify those organisations that are the 'best' in each question as determined by their own end users.
The 'Best Practice' intranet presentation
Since April 2009, nearly 11,000 intranet end users from 30 organisations in 12 countries have participated in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). We will be presenting an analysis of this data at the IntraTeam Event 2010 (International Conference about Intranet and Enterprise 2.0) in Copenhagen, Denmark - March 2-4, 2010.
Details of the sessions are below:
- A workshop on Tuesday 2nd March, 11.30am - 1pm about Building the Best Practice Intranet. The Workshop will look at some of the survey questions such as those related to the home page, finding information, and overall satisfaction and why some organisations have rated highly in these questions and others haven't
- On Wednesday 3rd March, 11 am - 11.50 we will be presenting the topic Building the Best Practice Intranet. During the presentation we will talking about what the WIC measures, why these are important, what have been the results so far, what are the qualities of the most effective intranets, and what qualities do end users think are important.
Other speakers at this international intranet conference include:
- Stephan Schillerwein (co-presenting the Worldwide Intranet Challenge findings)
- Jane McConnell (Future Intranet for New Ways of Working)
- James Robertson (What will a working day look like in 2015?)
- Mark Morrell (What’s the Full Value of Your Intranet?)
- Michael Sampson (Frameworks for Evaluating Collaboration Tools)
I would recommend that you consider attending this conference if you are interested in finding ways that your intranet can add even more value to your organisation.
Interested in participating in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC)?
The WIC is on-going - there is not cut-off date so you are free to participate at any time. There is no cost to participate in the WIC either and you can obtain feedback from your end users within a week. You will also receive your first benchmark report anonymously comparing your data with other participating orgnisations at no cost.
Some of the reasons you may want to participate include:
- To obtain support and evidence for an intranet improvement business case
- To get feedback about a new intranet redesign
- To help prioritise intranet improvement initiatives
- To help focus and motivate the intranet team
- To benchmark before-and-after an intranet re-design
- To compare your intranet with other organisations
- To gain an understanding of what is best practice for each question
- To provide qualitative data to senior management
It takes 5 minues to register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) and less than an hour in total to manage. You could have valuable feedback about your intranet in less than a week.
