Nielsen 2010 Report on Ten Best Intranets: Becoming More Social and Mobile

The 2010 version of the well-respected annual report on intranets by Jakob Nielsen was recently released and I was pleased to receive a review copy.  Jacob said that, Many winners offered sophisticated social networking features and several created separate mobile designs optimized for smart phones." The report said that employees increasingly expect "anytime, anyplace" access, and companies are starting to evaluate what that means specifically for their employees.  Two of the winners created special mobile-specific sites with reduced content and applications; another built a dedicated intranet application optimized for its preferred platform, the iPhone, its preferred mobile platform. The report recommends that companies follow this approach and created specific sites optimized for mobile users.

Given the rise of social computing within the enterprise it is nice to see this reflected in the winners. The social computing features in this year's winning intranets focused on two levels of interaction:  “providing the opportunity for employees to get to know one another as individuals and offering workgroup support that encourages work-related connections. Users on winning sites could create profiles, share content and even share bookmarks to their favorite sites.”  There were many opportunities for employee-generated content and many examples of increased transparency. Sounds like enterprise 2.0 to me.  

There was also a lot of emphasis on change management, user involvement in design, and the internal marketing of the new social features on the intranets. Several winners engaged a wider range of stakeholders in early communication that continued throughout the design process. As designs became more defined, some teams fielded special early-access programs that let smaller groups of people use the new design before it was rolled out to everybody. These are all best practices that have been discussed on this blog so it is good to see them in practice in successful efforts.

This is an interesting contrast to their 2007 report that stated that year’s winners “took a pragmatic approach to many hyped “Web 2.0″ techniques.” This careful approach appears to pay off as enterprise 2.0 features are now much more widespread and have keep up with times.  However, it is interesting that there are few repeat winners.

The complete 449-page report provides numerous illustrations of current trends. It is co-authored by Amy Schade, Jakob Nielsen and researcher Patty Caya. The report remains very useful for anyone wanting to keep up with what is happening at big firm intranets.