Intranet Innovation Awards 2012

It was a packed room today at the 2012 Intranet Innovation Awards as James Robertson of Step Two Designs shared with us highlights from the winners and finalists.

First up James showed us a couple of wonderful mobile intranet solutions. The best solutions develop from the question “what 6-8 things do staff most need when they are away from their desk?”. The Judge Group (recruitment firm) drilled their intranet down in their mobile version to include staff information, a simple search and an optimised version of their CRM system. Their mobile CRM allows field staff to access their database of candidate CVs and make case notes while on the road. Arup received a commendation for their mobile intranet which provides the staff directory, office locations and access to their project database with a simplified search drilling down on these functions. Both of these solutions provide critical information that staff need while mobile and improve their ability to perform key business tasks.

Andrew Mitchell from Urbis (consultancy company) then shared their award winning commercial dashboard. The purpose was to leverage data to enable directors to access commercial information in an appropriate format. I think the key elements to Urbis’ solution is that it is relevant information, in an attractive dashboard that is driving a behavioural change in their business. As an added bonus what they did was using out of the box tools (Microsoft SQL server) and that very little IT involvement is required to maintain (their finance team are empowered to update it).

James shared some more from the international winners who both took business critical information and presented it in innovative ways to provide business improvement. Weston Solutions took their Knowledge Management solution to the next level by surfacing the lessons learned from the post implementation review of their projects into key business applications (such as their intranet, project management system and CRM) to not only share the knowledge but encourage people to use the tool.  Christian Hansen created a mechanism to pull product information from multiple sources into one dashboard and then improved it further by making it easy to collate and export that information so their sales staff could share it with customers.

Next we heard from Ross Pavey of Scott Corp (hazardous goods transport firm) who shared their solution for streamlining a paper-driven process for their field staff (truck drivers). Their solution enabled drivers to easily scan in reports that would then automatically be filed in a digital library. The reports are related to their stringent safety requirements and the system allowed them to centralise the process, make it secure and auditable, and save a significant amount of time for staff.

Karina Smith of NSW Department of Education and Communities built a very attractive portal for their colossal intranet (servicing 140,000 staff). The wonderful bit is an icon based “quick links” area which is completely personal to the user. Staff get a default list by default which they can then add or remove from as they need choosing from a list of pre-defined options. What I love about it is that it gives the user full control of their links, and removes that argument which so often happens in the business about what goes in the links and in what order.

The session was finished up with the most interesting innovative solution. James showed us the gamification solution which Enter (Russian retail company) built on their social intranet. Their clever points system rewards staff for activities in the system and in the real world centred around their business values. Staff could reward each other through their staff directory pages and the points were cleverly skewed to reward people more or less depending on who was awarding the points or who was receiving them. They offered prizes such as mystery holidays or mystery lunches. The key to success of this is that it is core to their quirky culture.

I am looking forward to delving into the report to get some more detail about these wonderful solutions. As James pointed out, innovative solutions are often something we have already seen, just presented in a different way. The 2012 winners and finalists have certainly presented some elegantly simple solutions, they key being that they have provided a substantial benefit to the business.

Check out the Twitter highlights from this session (collated by Alex Manchester) and the Intranet Innovation Awards website for more details.