As I wrote in my May column of Intranets: Enterprise Strategies & Solutions (well worth the subscription: see IntranetsToday.com), great intranet parts can be bought some of the time, but truly great intranets cannot be bought entirely with money alone.
Truly innovative intranets have some or all of four general qualities:
- TRANSACTIONS – transactive features and applications that enable employees to more effectively execute their roles.
- ENGAGEMENT – engages employees in two-way conversations and dialogue.
- GOVERNANCE – have well-defined and managed governance models supported by executive management.
- CONTENT – above and beyond news, content that help employees do their jobs.
A fine example of a truly innovative intranet is last week’s case study example of OcГ© (see Intranet 2.0 case study: Oce) where a truly empowered team makes the most of a $5,000 budget and rolls out multiple social media tools including internal micro-blogging, social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, even an online TV channel on a shoe-string budget.
More examples of innovative intranets can be found in the annual Intranet Innovation Awards reports.