Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards 2020 #IDWAwards
The winners of the 2020 Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards have been announced. I feel privileged to have been part of this years judging panel and to have seen the detail behind the entries and the winners.
Over the years I have been on the opposite side of the award process several times, so I understand the effort and stress which goes in to submitting a project to an award. Spending time to summarise a huge project and clearly articulating the business benefits to stand out from the crowd is a challenge in itself.
At NEXTDC we were fortunate to be recognised as Silver Award Winners in 2018. The awards validated our hard work with independent recognition from an award which is free to enter, and that has global reach.
Through the awards process I used the word “impressive” a lot in my notes. I was impressed by truly tangible business benefits, ‘grass-roots’ solutions built by business teams (rather than IT), ambitious time frames, user friendly interfaces and change management focuses. Details behind the winning entries can be found in the showcase report, and by attending the online awards showcase.
This was the first year that a new award category was introduced for Office 365 Solutions and Adoption. The new category recognises the prevalence of Microsoft and Office 365 technologies in digital workplace solutions and, in my opinion, creates space for more entries related to business solutions developed from within the business by ‘citizen developers’ with no to low code required.
Thank you to Catherine Grenfell and James Robertson for inviting me to be on the judging panel this year. Kudos to Steve Bynghall who manages the awards and writes the report. And high-five to my fellow judges, an amazing group of digital workplace practitioners many of them who I have admired and known for years.
Themes
Through the awards process and his deep dive into the entries, awards manager Steve Bynghall has identified a number of themes from across all entries. The showcase report goes into detail about the themes and their relevance to the digital workplace now.
- democratisation of automation has arrived
- integration drives digital employee experience
- winners demonstrate SharePoint mastery
- empowered communities deliver success
- DEX is helping to educate the next generation
- governance underpins broader digital success
I think the themes from this years awards demonstrates a maturity in digital workplace where by teams have the tools and information to drive business solutions, with governance providing the parameters and new tools enabling in-house work.
3 ways to find out more about the winners
Winner summaries
The Step Two website features summaries and screenshots of all the award winners from 2020 and previous years.
Join the online showcase
This showcase will include live demonstrations and stories from winners in the pacific region.
Congratulations to the award winners
Gold winners
The winners across multiple categories (in alphabetic order):
- Amadeus IT Group (Spain): an ambitious global intranet based on SharePoint Online with strong social features and attractive templates, underpinned by a thorough approach to governance.
- Avito (Russia): a beautifully-designed HR-focused intranet with extensive integration, helping to automate HR processes (and beyond), resulting in significant time savings.
- Brisbane Catholic Education (Australia): a feature-rich and innovative SharePoint Online intranet with multiple integrations including an HR dashboard, accompanied by effective efforts around content governance and author training.
- Dept of Agriculture, Water and the Environment (Australia): an innovative data dashboard detailing analytics, engagement, readability and suggestions for every intranet page, using light gamification to encourage content owners to make improvements.
- DNV GL (Norway): a custom collaboration wizard built in Microsoft 365, driving self-service and governance across multiple types of collaboration spaces, empowering site owners and improving IT support processes.
- New South Wales Dept of Education (Australia): a ground-breaking portal to drive a community of practice around STEM teaching, using pinboard functionality to create and share learning resources with students and other teachers.
- SP Group (Singapore): a forward-thinking example of ‘citizen development’ using the Microsoft Power Platform to automate and transform a process around reporting gas leaks utilising tablets, driving huge efficiencies and all created with minimal IT input.
- Wellcome (UK): a modern Drupal-based intranet, featuring beautiful design and user-focused integrations, resulting in very high levels of user contribution, adoption and engagement.
Silver winners
The winners across multiple categories (in alphabetic order):
- M.Video Eldorado Group (Russia): an ambitious mobile-first intranet that supports processes standardisation and nurtures a ‘one company’ culture in a newly-merged large retail firm.
- STIHL Australia (Australia): an intranet-based portal to automate the end-to-end process for launching new products that cuts across multiple business functions, successfully driving efficiencies, reducing risk and raising accountability.
- Suncorp Group (Australia): a brilliantly-executed governance framework and engagement program, enabling a large content publisher community to deliver a new high quality, sustainable intranet.
- Telstra (Australia): a cyber security team using automation, SharePoint Online and gamification to scale up a awareness program involving champions, doubling it in size with no additional effort or resourcing.
- VELUX Group (Denmark): delivering a new global intranet based largely on SharePoint Online out of the box, at a fraction of the normal cost, aided by a mature and highly effective Office 365 adoption program.
