8 January 2009
Nielsen announces the 10 Best Intranets of 2009
Practitioners and experts comment on industry trends in intranet design and governance.
Jakob Nielsen (pictured, right) this week announced his top 10 best-designed intranets for 2009.
The winners of the award are:
- Altran, an engineering and innovation consultancy (France).
- Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (US).
- BASF SE, a 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 (US).
- Environmental Resource Management (ERM), a provider of environmental consulting services (Global).
- HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil).
- Kaupthing Bank (Iceland).
- L.L.Bean, an outdoor equipment vendor (US).
- McKesson Corporation, a pharmaceuticals, medical supplies and healthcare information technologies provider (US).
This year does show dramatically increased executive visibility for the intranet in many of the winning organizations.
While researching this year's winners, Nielsen noticed that intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint. Improving usability has also been a clear focus for communication and intranet teams.
In a separate article, the Hub's intranet expert and editorial board member, Michael Rudnick of Watson Wyatt, offers his interpretation of this year's Nielsen list, and provides examples of how organizations he's worked with have been developing their intranets.
Teams are getting bigger
Among this year's winners, the average organization has 37,500 employees. But smaller companies like Kaupthing Bank with 3,200 employees are still making the list. "Good user experience doesn't require size or humongous budgets; it requires talent and emphasis on meeting the users' needs," says Nielsen.
Neilsen notes that one of the strongest intranet trends is toward bigger intranet teams, with a growth rate of 12% per year over the 8 years that the design competition has been running. "When we started honoring intranet projects in 2001, the average winning team had 6 members; today, the average team size is 14," he says.
"Even this year's average team size of 14 is fairly small when it comes to providing a key work tool for organizations with 37,500 employees on average," Nielsen continues.
Involving consultants
During 2008, the Hub noted that many companies were undertaking significant intranet overhaul projects. Today, the predominant approach to running intranet design projects is to engage one or more consultants and external agencies to contribute parts of the design, while keeping overall control inside the company itself.
This year, 60% of the winners were designed by a combination of in-house and outside resources. The remaining 4 projects were done completely by the company's own staff. None of the winning intranets were designed exclusively by an external agency, even though this was a fairly common approach in earlier years.
If companies take more ownership of their intranets and devote resources to building sufficiently large intranet teams, they gain in-house expertise in the main areas of intranet user experience. Not all companies can afford intranet teams that are big enough to do everything on their own, however. Nielsen advises that there are at least 3 reasons to periodically consult "outsiders" about your intranet:
- To get a fresh, independent perspective. People who work on the same project for years can become too accustomed to a certain way of doing things.
- To provide deep expertise or a narrow skillset that the intranet team can't justify adding to their permanent, full-time headcount.
- To alleviate workload during crunch times, particularly during large redesign projects or rollouts.
Intranets' strategic role
Bigger intranet teams and increasing internal ownership of the intranet user experience both reflect the intranet's growing strategic role in supporting work processes.
COWI supplemented employee profiles with a feature that highlights commonalities between users and the profiles they view.
"Intranets today do much more than simply host the company phone book and HR manuals – though these components remain critically important, and teams are continuing to improve them," Nielsen says.
COWI, for example, supplemented employee profiles with a feature that highlights commonalities between directory users and the profiled employees they view (an interesting combination of personalization, social networking and the traditional staff directory.)
Reporting lines are changing
Another indication of the intranet's growing strategic importance is the fact that ERM is the first winning team that reports directly to the company chairman. As in past years, most other winners report to either Corporate Communications or IT, and having teams report to the top isn't likely to become commonplace.
But this year does show dramatically increased executive visibility for the intranet in many of the winning organizations. This executive involvement typically results from companies viewing the intranet as a collaboration tool and appreciating the increased business efficiency that a good intranet brings.
David Lavenda (pictured, left), VP Marketing and Product Strategy at software developer WorkLight says of this year's list and report “We see that the same trends the report identifies are mirrored beyond the ecosystem of the intranet, and are also prevalent in the way companies interact with customers, partners and employees in general."
We're seeing large organizations, particularly in the financial services industry, turning to web 2.0 as a way to enhance user experience and provide meaningful business benefits, without requiring a large portal or intranet overhaul," Lavenda continues.
Substantial social media improvements
As Lavenda says, this year's winners showed a substantial increase in both collaboration support and social networking features. "Although inspired by the internet's web 2.0 sites, these features often have a much stronger business model within the enterprise, simply because they're more useful and less subject to noise and information pollution by 'bozos'," says Nielsen.
For example, at DTT, employees can add their own videos to the corporate TV network. "Quite the enterprise YouTube," he says.
Facing up to Facebook
Teams are also adding Facebook-like features to employee directories to enrich the profiles. That said, the designs are for a work environment – not for commenting on personal photos or supporting teenage dating behaviors," Nielsen notes. He advises that while it's appropriate to be inspired by popular social networking websites, your actual user interface and features must be freshly designed specifically for the intranet.
"At BA we continue to develop our intranet and are already, for example, experimenting with wikis and looking at opportunities to use ideas based on Facebook (with a definite business focus) for our employee directory," says Tony Breadmore (pictured, right), communications manager,
Employee Self Service Programme at British Airways (BA).
We recognise that adopting web 2.0 and social networking features are the way forward as these are used so widely outside of the workplace, though only as long as they are implemented with clear governance and guidelines," Breadmore continues.
Benchmark for internal blogging
The vast majority of the winning intranets now feature CEO blogs, but this is not new. HSBC Bank Brazil's CEO blog started in 2005 and has since been viewed more than 2 million times and accumulated 8,000 employee comments.
"These statistics imply about 1 comment for every 250 employee viewings of the CEO blog, a level that's consistent with other research on user participation in online communities," says Nielsen.
He advises that you can use this level as a rough benchmark to assess whether your own CEO blog is sufficiently inviting of employee participation.
What's new this year, however, is the sheer prevalence of this communication tool; we now have enough good examples to specify 9 guidelines for an intranet CEO blog. (For expert advice, read the Hub's 8 ways to be a great blog coach for your CEO 
, straight from the mouth of a CEO blogger – Jim Estill, CEO of Synnex Canada.)
Interactive discussion features
Another example of an effective social feature is ERM's interactive forum. This tool has helped consultants have urgent requests for advice answered by their colleagues around the world.
"The forum has virtually eliminated panicky broadcast emails at ERM, thus improving the productivity of the many knowledge workers who are no longer interrupted by requests that they might have no qualifications or experience to solve," says Nielsen.
Multilingual intranets make good use of personalization to increase usability by presenting pages in the user's preferred language.
He notes that the community feature often helps the company quickly construct better proposals for key clients on short deadlines.
Introducing more customization options
As many of this year's winners show, intranet personalization is becoming increasingly sophisticated. The leading application of personalization is to provide each employee with news updates focused on their job role and personal interests.
"If intranets show everyone everything, information overload ensues and people either ignore the news area or squander their time reading irrelevant stories," Nielsen says.
Simple customization can often generate sizeable productivity wins, he advises. For example, at McKesson, sales people can create a "My Product List" and "My Favorite Reports", freeing them from having to wade through the much longer lists of all available options. Much appreciated when you're on the phone with a customer and would prefer to focus your mental resources on closing the sale, rather than navigating the intranet.
Collaboration rise
"The report notes that there has been substantial increase in the collaborative and social networking, personalization and customization, and user-centered features. These are all inherent characteristics of a web 2.0 for business application. A prime example of this is Standard Chartered Bank’s use of Facebook as a secure internal network," says Lavenda.
At AMD, users can customize links directly in the main menu bar, which integrates the user's personal favorites much more tightly with the intranet navigation than the traditionally separate Quick Links feature.
Breadmore notes "As the winning entries show, intranets are no longer just information repositories. Now intranets have to earn their keep by providing employees with the tools they need to their job. This is more powerful when personalization provides targeted applications, news and information for users, and the ability for them to customize links and features."
Intranets are no longer just information repositories.
Translate for maximum impact
Multilingual intranets use personalization to increase usability by presenting pages in the user's preferred language as much as possible.
For example, BASF's main intranet sections are available in 13 different languages, and several other winners also have internationalization and localization support that goes beyond what we see on most internet sites.
Predictions for the future: SharePoint
In all previous years, the only conclusion regarding technology was that there was no universal platform for designing good intranets. Winners typically used a wide diversity of implementation packages. "Although this conclusion continues to hold this year, it's less pronounced," says Nielsen.
Among the winning intranets, many are built on a single intranet platform that integrates most of the supporting features they need – including a content management system (CMS) and search. Some winners supplement their main platform with a few selected tools for specialized purposes – mainly web analytics.
"If we were to hazard a prediction," says Nielsen, "it would be that traffic statistics, search log analysis and other analytics tools will be substantially beefed up and integrated in future releases of the main intranet software platforms."
The 10 winners were built on 26 different products — substantially fewer than the 41 used in 2008 or the 49 used in 2007. Half of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007).
Despite the big growth in SharePoint use among the best intranets, the contest is far from over for intranet software platforms. Many other good enterprise software vendors offer widely used solutions. This year, for example, multiple winners used Autonomy, Google Search and WebTrends.
User-centred design on the increase
Over the award's 9-year history, there's been a steady increase in user-centered design. The following chart shows the proportion of winning intranets that employed various methods across three different 3-year periods (see Figure 1, below).
"The use of all methods has substantially increased; it's particularly gratifying to see the extent to which designers are embracing paper prototyping and other low-cost testing methods," says Nielsen.
Figure 1. Winning intranets that employed some of the main usability methods in their design process
Diagram: www.useit.com
Return on redesigns
To assess the return on investment (ROI) of intranet redesigns, teams primarily relied on usage metrics in terms of users, visits, or page views. Across this year's winners, the average increase in intranet use was 106%. This is about the same as we've seen in previous years: The average usage increase in the 2005–2008 winners was 110%. "So, roughly speaking, improving an intranet's usability will double its use," says Nielsen.
L.L.Bean conducted a benchmark study comparing its old and new designs. The old intranet had a success rate of 67% and an average time-on-task of 1 minute and 52 seconds. The new intranet has a success rate of 88% and users require only 54 seconds on average to perform the same tasks.
In other words, users can perform more than twice as many tasks per hour with the new design.
Consulting sector has outstanding intranets
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu also made the Nielsen list in 2002 for its Australian member firm's intranet; this year, its worldwide intranet is the winner. Cisco Systems is the only other member that has won the award twice.
But this year sees the first winner from Latin America. And signalling ongoing globalization, a winner that isn't headquartered in any individual country is also on the list.
The consulting sector is this year's best-represented industry, with 3 winners on the list. "Given the knowledge-intensive nature of consulting and this year's trend toward more collaboration-focused intranets this makes sense," says Nielsen.
The Intranet Design Annual including screenshots from the intranets of the 10 winners for 2009 is available for download.
Have your say
Are you struggling to get buy in at this time of recession for what you consider necessary improvements to your intranet – improvements that could increase engagement and therefore, in turn, company profitability?
What platform do you use for your intranet? What pros and cons have you encountered?
Recommended resources:
Melcrum report: Transforming Your Intranet (2nd edition)
Nielsen names top 10 intranets 2008
Quick and cost-effective ways to overhaul your intranet
Intranet forum showcases innovative portal features
UK intranet forum makes telling predictions about future workforce
Q&A with Michael Rudnick: What's your interpretation of Jakob Nielsen's 10 Best Intranets of 2009?
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