The hottest topics in the intranet world

Each year IBF covers some of the hottest topics in the intranet world in its Research Programme. Now it’s that time of year when we ask our members to vote on the topics they want to see covered in next year’s programme. I’ve been taking an early look at the results of this survey, which closes at the end of October, to see what topics are climbing up the list. If you’re a member and haven’t yet had your say, you can do so from the member extranet!

So what did I find from that “early look”? Here are a few highlights:

• Usability: always high on the list for intranet teams, I think we’ll be looking into the latest good practice relating to usability. This also follows a recent refresh to our usability benchmarking which will tie-in to give a fresh perspective on this area.
• Inside out intranet: also popular in the early results is the “Inside out intranet”, looking at redefining the firewall and the boundaries between the intranet and website, which Paul Miller IBF’s Founder and CEO, video blogged about recently.
• Intranet maturity: at a recent episode of Intranets Live one of the early results we heard from Jane McConnell’s 2009 Global Intranet Survey was that only 14% of participants said that their online workplace is unified. I know this is a broad issue for our members and we’re looking at some research in intranet maturity models/ roadmaps to help organisations understand where their intranet is at, and how to move it closer to that unified workplace.
• Operational intranets: having managed an operational intranet myself I know that it can be hard to track down specific good practice and advice in this area. So it’s interesting to see that so far there is quite a bit of interest in looking at the impact of intranets on operational areas of the business such as customer services and sales.

With a couple of weeks before the survey closes, things may well change – but my hunch is that the above highlights will make it to the final shortlist of six topics that we cover in the 2010 Research Programme.

Over the years we’ve covered a range of topics and built up a valuable bank of research papers on intranet topics from strategy and governance to social media and sustainability. (I only wish I’d had access to this back in the days when I was managing an intranet!)

From time to time, IBF does make research available to non-members and you can find this research in our Online Shop (including a couple of free reports).

Comments

[aion kinah]

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