The World's Best Intranets in 2009
Are you into collaboration? Then you'll no doubt be interested in the Nielsen Norman Group's unveiling of the world's 10 best intranets, recognized for outstanding design and a rich integration of features such as social networking.
Web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen (pictured), principal of Nielsen Norman Group, noted that this year's winners "showed a substantial increase in both collaboration support and social-networking features."
"Although inspired by the open Internet's "Web 2.0" sites, these features often have a much stronger business model within the enterprise, simply because they're more useful and less subject to noise and information pollution by bozos."Social networking in intranets delivers true business benefit, he says, by allowing employees to share information and knowledge more easily, as well as fostering stronger employee connections by bringing more personal information into the workplace.
Every intranet recognized offered one or more social features, including:
- Facebook-like features in company directories
- Personal video space
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Spaces to solicit help or input
- Task-handling collaborative space
- Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
- Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
- BASF SE, the world's leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
- COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
- Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a financial services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (USA)
- Environmental Resource Management (ERM), one of the world's leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
- HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil)
- Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
- L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
- McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)