Intranet benchmarking

Denmark’s premier intranet community and conference organizer, IntraTeam (arguably the World’s most active and advanced, certainly per capita) has launched an Intranet/Digital Workplace Self Assessment Benchmark. In truth, the tool has been around since 2005 and used to evaluate the competitors to the Danish IntranetPrize, awarded at the their annual IntraTeam Event conference.

The Assessment Benchmark features 299 questions divided into 19 categories including:

• Strategy
• Communication
• Internal Social Media
• Integrations
• Governance
• Management
• Engagement & Support
• Mobile
• Apps
• Search
• Staff Directory
• Usability
• Navigation
• Analytics
• Language
• Content
• Collaboration
• HR
• Homepage
• ROI

Benchmarking is represented in chart form and in ‘spiderwebs’ for comparing intranets.

155 mostly Danish organizations participated in the benchmark survey to date; 31 participants come from 8 other countries. Some of the key findings are very revealing:

• The average overall score out of 100 was 22%
• The best score was over 53%
• Only 3% have a detailed intranet strategy (nearly 50% have no strategy at all)
• More than half (54%) say resources (funding) for the intranet will remain unchanged this year; about 30% say they will see an increase in resources
• One-third of respondents have 2-5 dedicated staff for their intranet; 15% have 6-10 staff
• About half of respondents use internal social media and collaboration tools
• Nearly 50% have a mobile or responsive intranet (or app) and 93% of these have mobile access to internal news
• 30% use microblogging and 70% of these use Yammer; 13% use Slack
• 22% have an app for Yammer; three out of 10 using the Yammer app say it works well
• 62% use SharePoint or Office 365 in some shape or form; (the next most popular platform is Wizdom, which is an add-on to SharePoint)
• 47% of users see the intranet as their primary news source for the organization
• 57% allow user commenting in news stories
• 70% claim to have intranets that deliver information that can be personalized by business unit, department and/or location

Most interesting in the findings is the increase of social intranet tools, and personalized content feeds. Social and collaboration are now mainstream functions on European intranets, and no longer the fad decried by some. It’s worth noting that given this author’s penchant to stress the importance of planning, and governance, it’s not surprising that the average score is only 22%, and only 3% have a detailed plan.

The 2017 IntranetPrize, awarded to the best intranet submitted to the benchmarking process at the 2017 IntraTeam Event, was awarded to FOA. FOA, a labour union in Denmark with 186,000 members, won the prize with a overall benchmark score of 53%. Past winners include Jyske Bank, TDC, SimCorp, Chr. Hansen A/S, Danske Bank, Tivoli and others.

The benchmark has 299 questions about functions and content in the intranet and digital workplace. Some of these questions are about maintaining the content and applications on the intranet.

“The IntraTeam Self Assessment Benchmark has a lot of very valuable and detailed questions. The assessment result gives you an insight into how your organization exploits the potential of a Digital Workplace,” says Thomas Maeder, Senior Digital Experience Manager, Swisscom.

Despite the European flavour, the benchmark survey is now available to organizations across the planet. If you wish to participate in the survey (the first part requires 10-20 minutes) then you will receive the survey results for free. If you participate in the full benchmark study (which requires 30-40 minutes), you get an overall score and a spider web graph showing how good you are in the 19 categories compared to the best in each category.

More advanced reports and segmenting can be done by industry and organization size, for a fee. If you’d like to benchmark your intranet versus these organizations and all other participants, please write to Info@IntraTeam.dk or for visit the IntraTeam website (http://www.intrateam.com/node/21980).

Many world-class intranets and digital workplaces, including those from Google, Coca-Cola, Bayer, and others, with detailed case studies are presenting at this year’s Digital Workplace & Intranet Global Forum conference in New York (Oct. 25 – 26). Early-bird registration is only $890 for the full conference.

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