2009 Intranet Innovation Awards Now Live!

A couple of days back my good friend Alex Manchester blogged about something that I think would be really exciting for folks out there working in a corporate environment and enjoying the many advantages of having a state of the art and innovative Intranet. And if they have been involved with developing, maintaining or improving existing ones, even better! Yes, as you may have seen it already, I am talking about Step Two Designs‘ 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards! … They are now LIVE!

Even though you would be able to find plenty of good details about the awards themselves on the main homepage (Or in this particular information pack) I thought I would share over here a short excerpt of what their main goal is. More than anything else to give you an idea of what to expect (Something really cool to say the least!):

"The Intranet Innovation Awards are open to any professional or team that works directly on a company intranet site, whether a global corporation or small business. Previous winners have included brokerage firms to national non-profits, pharmaceutical subsidiaries to insurance and financial services organisations.

Their winning entries have ranged from small, web-like applications and carefully crafted persona packs, to competitor intelligence wikis, "Team sites in a box", workflow tools, enhanced staff directories, location tools, community forms and speaking intranet news."

Thus why did I mention that this is something really exciting for those folks involved with Intranets? Well, because more than anything else, it could well be one very handy and powerful way to demonstrate those skeptics out there it is possible to put together a good amount of work to produce some stunning Intranet user experiences where knowledge workers can benefit the most not only from traditional methods of reaching out, connect, collaborate, learn and share your knowledge across, but also to show off how some of those corporate Intranets have entered the 21st century by adopting some of the most compelling emerging technologies within the social computing space: such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking and social tagging tools, etc. etc.

I am not sure what you would think, but I feel that initiatives like the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards are incredibly helpful to help recognise the really hard, and most of the times hidden, piece of work of those folks heavily involved with building up the next generation of the Intranet user experience. So why not recognise their work and place a submission for your own Intranet? I am sure there would be plenty of candidates out there that could well make the next round of winners. So why not have your own Intranet as part of the long, and rather prestigious, existing list of winners. Does your Intranet have what’s needed to receive such an award? If yes, what are you waiting for?

Go for it!

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Communication, Connections, Productivity, Intranets, Intranet, Corporate Intranet, Alex Manchester, Step Two Designs, Intranet Innovation Awards, IIA, 2009, Social Innovation, Winners, State of the Art