User-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group today announced the winners of its ninth annual intranet design contest. This year saw substantial increases in the use among top Intranets of social networking and collaboration support features.
The 10 organizations with winning intranets span six industries and are based in six different countries, plus one from an organization that is not headquartered in any individual country. Their employee populations average 37,500 people, with the smallest being 3,200 employees. The average size of the teams managing these intranets is 14 members.
In alphabetical order, the winners are:
- Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
- Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
- BASF SE, the world’s leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
- COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
- Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a financial services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (USA)
- Environmental Resource Management (ERM), one of the world’s leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil) - Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
- L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
- McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)
“Social networking ideas pioneered on the open Internet are being applied today to intranets not just for the sake of offering the latest and greatest features, but because they deliver true business benefit, the most important of which is allowing employees to share information and knowledge more easily, and in some cases, bring more personal information into the workplace, promoting stronger connections among employees,” said Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group. “As a testament to how important and helpful this movement has become, every winner in our contest this year offered one or more social features.”
The most prevalent among the social networking elements added to this year’s top intranets were the Facebook-like features offered in the employee directories to enrich the employee profiles. One intranet offered an “In Common With You” section to highlight common interests when a user views a colleague’s profile. Another organization allows employees to add personal videos to the corporate TV network in something of an enterprise YouTube. The number and type of blogs also increased this year over previous years and now include not only CEO and leadership blogs, but also employee blogs.
Collaboration spaces also increased. Besides wikis and document and task handling, several of the winning intranets added spaces in which employees can broadcast requests for help or input from colleagues, marking them as “urgent” when necessary and “solved” once the issue has been addressed.
The report, “Intranet Design Annual 2009: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets,” is available to download for $224 from the Nielsen Norman Group website.Altran, AMD, BASF , COWI, DTT, ERM, HSBC, Kaupthing Bank, LLBean, McKesson Corp,
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