Top Trends for Improving Your Intranet

Tom Dunlap
7/26/2006

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An interactive marketing and technology services firm has help for you if you're wondering how to handle your increasingly complex and sprawling corporate intranet -- or if you're looking to make small improvements to your setup.

Avenue A/Razorfish has released a comprehensive, 43-page report on the best way to analyze, run and grow a corporate intranet and the best practices for meeting the growing expectations of employees.

The report, "Corporate Intranets Best Practices Report: A User-Driven Web 2.0 Perspective," gives real-world examples and shares industry trends and insight from leading intranet managers. It's supported by industry research and best practices of how intranets mature as they evolve from grass roots departmental efforts to enterprise portal programs and beyond.

"To determine where to go, it helps to know where you are," said Shiv Singh, national director, Enterprise Solutions, Avenue A/Razorfish, and an author of the report. "For the first time, companies in the United States have the context to gauge the maturity of their intranets."

Along with the report, Avenue A/Razorfish formally debuted the Intranet Maturity Framework. The company says the framework defines and analyzes for the first time the six stages of intranet maturity to help businesses assess the maturity level of their technology and understand how to improve. For each of the six different stages of maturity, the firm analyzes eight dimensions: sponsorship, governance, user needs, experience design, technology, training, adoption, and ROI metrics.

The most compelling section of the report is entitled "Trends That Will Change Your Intranet." Trends include:

  • Intranets will become even more pervasive: Expect to see many more dynamic, innovative intranets in the near future, whether they're servicing the board members of a Fortune 500 company or farmers in a developing country. Also, expect to be challenged to deliver more dynamic and innovative intranet solutions for your employees and business partners. The intranet growth is mostly seen with intranets in the third stage as companies realize the power of collaboration in a shared electronic space.

  • User experience matters at last: In the past, employees have demanded more aesthetic experiences on their intranet. But another trend is surfacing. Employees are demanding simpler, more intuitive and more Web-like intranet experiences. Call it the "Google Effect."

  • Blogs come and go but RSS will remain: Blogs were arguably the most significant Web phenomenon of 2005. Everybody from presidential nominees to the local postman is blogging these days. But will employee blogs last? Avenue A/Razorfish says the technology to watch is Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Companies that embrace RSS as a content format and use it to publish information to employees will have far greater success than with blogging alone.

  • All intranets are maturing through the stages: As intranets integrate into the organizations they serve, they are losing their independent identities. Why? Because IT departments are pushing to consolidate the interfaces, applications and data sources accessed every day. Expect the pace of this consolidation to quicken, especially as companies standardize their portal infrastructures and integrate Voice over IP and other functionality. For example, corporate email, telephony, mobile warrior applications, virtual team rooms, executive dashboards, and enterprise intranets are currently distinct tools with independent owners and budgets. However, in the not-too-distant future, you'll have a single, integrated voice and data interface.

    The best practices report and podcasts of report segments are available at http://www.avenuea-razorfish.com/enterprisesolutions/.



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