This year I have had the great pleasure of judging the Intranet Innovation Awards, together with Jane McConnell and Howard McQueen. The Awards were set up by James Robertson, Step Two Designs, Sydney, as a way of recognising and rewarding intranet managers who have gone that extra mile in developing a feature on their intranet that has a direct and immediate impact on business operations. Entries came in from around the world and the task of judging was not easy as there were so many worthy winners, all of whom had taken a lot of care in the presentation of their case for the Awards.

Fuller Landau (Canada), this platinum winner, delivers a rich set of functionality to support core business processes in an accounting firm. Syngenta (Switzerland)  created a full-featured location finder to help knit together the 210 locations this agrochemcial company has in more than 90 countries. Swiss Post delivers  a speaking intranet news via a 0800 number to their postmen and postbus drivers. Transfield Services (Australia), rolled out a SharePoint solution for collaboration that will be the envy of many, providing extensive support for users plus an overall governance model. British Airways use their Crew Community Forums to support peer-to-peer collaboration, and to solve a myriad of operational challenges. Scottrade (USA) use a wiki to capture and communicate key information on their competitors in the fiercely competitive financial industry. Urbis (Australia) have provided a project finder to help their professional services firm answer the question: what have we done before? Janssen-Cilag  have taken the normally behind-the-scenes task of tracking IT equipment and made it into a user-facing solution that streamlines common tasks. Finally YHA (UK) provide a meter reading application that helps staff in hostels support the goal of the organisation to reduce energy usage by 10%.

Fuller Landau was a worthy outright winner and they were presented with their award at the KM World/Intranets 2008 Conference in San Jose. My own favourite was Swiss Post. The reason for this is that all too often intranets just support desktop-enabled staff. In many organisations of all sizes a signficant proportion of the workforce has very limited access to the intranet, be they road maintenance workers in Nottingham or shop assistants in Kuwait, just two places I have faced this challenge as a consultant.

Full details of the awards can be found in a report that has just been published by Step Two Designs which really does go behind the scenes and look at the business case for the application and the way in which it was developed and tested. There may be intranet managers who think they have nothing to learn from award winners who are not very similiar to their own organisation. They will be wrong. A little lateral thinking can go a long way in intranet development. For any intranet manager this report will have a high Eureka factor.

Martin White