Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC)

WICly intranet news #7

8th October - 21st October, 2011 WIC LinkedIn Group news
It has been a busy couple of weeks on the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) LinkedIn Group. Design a useful intranet home page and win a Kindle Firstly the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) is sponsoring a competition, open to anyone, to design a USEFUL intranet home page. Now is the chance for you to put your web design and IA skills to the test and enter the competition to develop the most useful intranet home page. You could win a Kindle Fire. Not to mention world wide fame and recognition.  WIC Workshops The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) is running a series of workshops in North America in late November, early December. The workshops are based on feedback from the 23,000+ intranet end users from 70+ organisations who have participated in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). Find out what intranet end users really want from an intranet. 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards: Australian Roadshows: Free The winners of the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards were unveiled last week, and yet again, amazing ideas have surfaced. These include three approaches to mobile intranets, core business tools, social intranets, and much more. Want to hear what all the fuss is about? Step Two is presenting the 2011 Innovation Awards Roadshow where you will hear all about the winning entries, see screenshots and hear what set these entries apart from the rest. These events will take part in in four cities: Brisbane: 25th October (register online) Canberra: 2nd November (register online) Sydney: 8th November (register online) Melbourne: 30th November (register online) To get all the insights from this year's Awards, obtain a copy of the 2011 Intranet Innovations report. This 179 page report contains 14 case studies and over 200 screenshots. Regards  Andrew Wright WIC Group Manager
Contributor of the week
Stacy Wilson Owner and Communication Consultant, Eloquor Consulting, Inc. Summary:  Stacy helps organizations communicate more effectively with their employees. She and her team at Eloquor Consulting, Inc., focus on technology and change communication that champions the information needs of employees.		Located: Denver, USA Stacy has contributed a number of useful updates recently to the WIC LinkedIn group recently. Especially to the discussion, OK, Your Intranet's Coolest Feature Is?
Discussion of the week	Blog post of the week		Event of the week
Should there be less news on intranet home pages?	The Digital Workplace – just the next generation of your good old Intranet? Stephan Schillerwein		Check out: The Intranet Global Forum 2011, Nov 9,10 NYCChris Chambers
Other discussions	Other blog posts		Other Events
How "branded" is your intranet? Julian Thorne Intranet Governance - do you require your departmental sites and pages to have the same look and feel? How tough is this to enforce? Sheila Heffernan Hi all, doing a paper on internal site search analysis for our Intranet. We've not had an official process in the past. Zeb Ahmed Online workflowed forms, document management... Intranet Dashboard? Isis Abbott  Besides Sharepoint, what are the top 3-5 WCMs available on the market today? What are you using? What have you read? Will be sending RFPs but there are so many choices out there! Mike Janes	2011 Intranet Excellence Awards - from Interact Intranet I found a great resource for Australian Government intranets - I am sure it can be applied across other sectors too! Jonathon Crabtree Using DeskWork Corporate Portal Tip1: Kaly Alexandre Competition open: design a useful intranet home page and win a Kindle Poll: Employees want more how-to content on intranets		Upcoming Intranet event - Beyond The Desktop: Dynamic and Intuitive Intranets Rachael Wheldall 23-24 November 2011 Brisbane  Intranets2012 (Sydney, May 2012): call for papers now open James Robertson Submissions close 1st December Social Workplace Conference (10% Discount Code) November 1 - Vic Okezie CALL FOR SPEAKERS for the Intranet 2.0 Conference! January 30 - February 2, 2012 - Kelly Werwie Intranet Workshop in London, Nov 28 Stephan Schillerwein

Competition: Design a useful intranet home page and win a Kindle

Have you ever looked at your organization's intranet home page, and thought 'I can do better than this'? Would you like to be recognized world-wide as an intranet design genius? Would you like to get your hands on a Kindle Fire (valued at $199)? 

Well now is your big chance! The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) thinks intranet home pages are due for a radical overhaul and is sponsoring a competition, open to anyone, to design a USEFUL intranet home page.

You can design the home page for your own organization if you wish. Or you can design the page for a fictitious organization (for example, Smart & Savvy Solutions - see below for more details about S&SS). 

 

Designing the home page

You can design your home page using any tool you like - Visio, Powerpoint, Paint.net, Photoshop, webs.com... or you could use a more purpose built tool such as Balsamiq, IntranetWireFrames, and Intranetfactory (all of these products offer a free trial). You could even hand draw it on paper and then scan it...  it's up to you to decide which tool suits you best. The only requirement is that final entries are submitted as an image file (eg. .PNG .JPG .GIF).

Your design can be as detailed, good looking, boring or as interesting as you like. You might take 30 minutes to whip up a design or it could take you a few hours. It's up to you how much time and effort you put in.The criteria that people will be asked to use for voting is simply:

Which intranet home page do you think would be the most useful to its employees?

 

Competition Details

The competition is open now. Entries can be submitted by email to:

• awright@cibasolutions.com.au
• Subject: Intranet Home Page Design competition 
• Using 100 words or less, explain your design, its features and how it works

To get you going, you may find the following resources useful:

• 9 intranet content types that add value to your organisation
• The most useful intranet types
• Should there be news on the frontpage of the intranet
• Discussing the length of the intranet homepage
• Seven roles of the intranet homepage
• 37 intranet home page screen shots

Important note: This is NOT a competition for people to submit screen shots of existing intranets. Jakob Nielson's top 10 intranet award and the IBF's My Beautiful Intranet competition are two opportunities for doing this.  

 

Smart & Savvy Solutions - company background

S&SS has around 800 employees worldwide and provides consulting services to other organizations, helping them streamline, organize and improve internal business processes. Around 600 employees work away from the office on client sites or from home. The company has small office teams of 10-20 people in a dozen of the world's major cities.

The company's main documents include project plans, proposals, design and solution documents, case studies, contracts, research papers and the other usual documents you would expect to find in a consulting organization. Most revenue comes from project based work.

 

Summary of conditions

• Anyone can enter the competition. You can submit more than one entry if you wish.
• You can use any tool or software you like to design your page. Entries need to be submitted as an image file (eg .PNG .JPG .GIF)
• The winner will be decided by a public vote and will receive a Kindle Fire (due for release November 15)
• The winner will also be interviewed and a blog article written explaining the inspiration behind the winning design. The article will be emailed in an announcement to the 11,000+ WIC LinkedIn Group members.
• The criteria people will use for voting will be:"'Which intranet home page do you think would be the most useful to its employees?"
• Entries close on Monday December 5, 2011
• An intranet panel will review all intranet entries and select a final list of 20 to be published and eligible to receive votes
• The WIC reserves the right to remove an entry deemed to have obtained votes unfairly
• All finalists names will be published 
• All entries will be published at the same time on December 7 and voting will be open for 3 weeks.
• The winner will be announced on December 31st, 2012.

Quick poll results: the most useful intranet content types

I ran a poll recently asking people to rate the usefulness of 9 intranet content types that add value to your organisation. 221 people (as at Sat Oct 15) responded to the poll and the results were surprising.

In comparison to the other content types, the usefulness of news/blogs was relatively well down the list. And yet many intranet home pages continue to be dominated by news (see tables below).

 

Implications for intranet home page design

If we look at the intranet home pages submitted to the My Beautiful Intranets competition of 2011, we can see that the majority of these are comprised of news, articles, latest news, internal news, external news, company news, announcements, etc.

Where is the space for these other, more useful content types?

 

Implications for top level intranet navigation

If we go further and also review the top level menu items for each of these pages, it is difficult to find top level menu items called 'How to' or 'Procedures'. In fact from the 37 home pages submitted and the 13 top level navigation items identified in the article Intranet information architectures (50 in total), I counted the following: 

• 26 organisations have News or News & Events as a top level item
• 16 have an About Us item
• 11 had Tools 
• 5 had Policies
• 5 had Collaboration
• 4 had Forms
• and a measily 4 had Procedures or a 'How Do I' heading

 

Graph

Yet if we look at the graph below showing the average response for each content type, we can see that 'How to/procedures' is considered to be the most useful type of intranet content closely followed by 'Forms/tools/templates' and then 'Structured content'.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surely, based on the above feedback, a good argument can be made that:

• more space on the home page should be given to listing popular forms, tools, how to topics and popular lists (such as key phone numbers)
• less space should be given to news
• more top level menu items should point staff directly to these types of content, instead of putting them at hard to find lower levels such as Business Unit headings or user defined categories such as Survival Kit, Campus, Workplace, Laundry, Employee Central or Employee Resources.

 

Breakdown of responses by role

Numerical results for the above graph, shown by Job Role, are listed below.

Note: The 76 responses from the Other group are comprised of the following roles: Other 30, Content Development 19, Management 14, Marketing 5, Sales 4, Human Resources 3, Public Relations 1

Results are reasonably consistent for each content type between the job roles, with the exception being the usefulness of News/blogs. People with Communication roles rate the usefulness at 4.31, IT roles at 3.77 and Other roles at 3.89. This would seem natural as the people most likely responsible for managing the news would have a communications background.

If you want to view the raw data for the poll, click one of the following links:

• View the results (Web page)
• View the results (CSV file)

 

Measure the effectiveness of your intranet content types

If you would like to measure how effective your intranet is at delivering the above content types, why not participate in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). There is no cost to participate.

If you would like to learn more about these content types and how to improve your intranet's home page and top level navigation, consider attending a Designing Successful Intranets workshop (USA & Canada only).

Survey: How useful are these intranet content types?

I wrote a blog post recently about the 9 intranet content types that add value to your organisation. The article lists and gives examples of the different types of content that can be supported by an intranet. The thought occurred to me that a survey about this list could help provide an indication of the relative importance of each content type and subsequenly how much time and effort should be given to managing each type.

Indicate the degree of usefulness you think each intranet content type can add to your organization.

View the results (Web page)

View the results (CSV file)

WICly intranet news #6

24 September - 7th October, 2011 WIC LinkedIn Group news
Step Two's annual intranet innovation award winners have just been announced. This is the 5th year of the awards. This year's report includes over 200 screen shots from 14 case studies. The 2011 winners are below. Platinum award winner Visual effects project management tool - Framestore (UK) Gold award winners Mobile intranet - Queensland University of Technology (Australia) Mobile intranet - UK Parliament (UK) Just in time content - CRS Australia (Australia) Expertise location and LinkedIn connector - Lundbeck (Denmark) Personalisation - Malmo Stad (Sweden) Alu TV video sharing platform - Alcatel-Lucent (France) SportsAid Amazing Race- Arup (UK) Customer-centric intranet - ScottsMiracle-Gro (USA) Online and mobile conference tool - Lafarge (France) Corey Lyons has also posted a good question this week, OK, Your Intranet's Coolest Feature Is? Some interesting responses have already been given. Would be good to read a few more. A final note: When posting blog articles, if possible would members please word the article as a discussion topic. For a good example, see the post Should all intranets have commenting on news?  Regards  Andrew Wright WIC Group Manager
Contributor of the week
Gabrielle Sani Intranet Manager at Oxfam International Summary:  Strong interest in Development, Knowledge Management, and Mobile technologies, having founded and participated in several initiatives.		Located: London, UK Gabrielle provided a good tip about integrating SharePoint with Google Analytics. Gabrielle has also contributed a number of updates recently to the WIC LinkedIn group.
Discussion of the week	Blog post of the week		Event of the week
OK, Your Intranet's Coolest Feature Is? Corey Lyons	Unveiled: winners of 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards James Robertson		Handy list of upcoming intranet, CMS, SharePoint and social media events
Other discussions	Other blog posts		Other Events
Quick question - does anyone know of a good tool that integrates SharePoint and Google Analytics? Nader Balata  How "branded" is your intranet? Julian Thorne  Should all intranets have commenting on news? James Robertson Hi members, Interested to know how many of you use "search" as a tool to drive your Intranet engagement and usabilty? Darryl Hannah	30 More Ways to a Better Intranet Andrew Wright My Site Profile Reporting for SharePoint 2010 Trevor Speirs Thank You for Participating in The Social Intranet Survey Michael Marchionda  Is Steve Jobs the Michelangelo of our times? Cecil Dijoux		Social Workplace Conference (10% Discount Code) November 1 - Vic Okezie CALL FOR SPEAKERS for the Intranet 2.0 Conference! January 30 - February 2, 2012 - Kelly Werwie Intranet Workshop in London, Nov 28 - Stephan Schillerwein