Last week Step Two Designs launched the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards.
Why should you enter this year?
Aside from a beautiful glass trophy, extensive, global coverage of your story, and the opportunity to say, 'We won an award!' there's a more serious side.
Winning at Urbis
Last year, Andrew MItchell's team at Urbis Australia won an Award for their "Project Finder" tool, which helps Urbis teams answer the question, "What have we done before?".
When it's been demoed in relation to the Awards (see the video interview here), the Project Finder has invoked considerable envy among other consulting firms, but it's also been of benefit beyond its main utility:
"Winning the [Intranet Innovation] Award in 2008 has helped raise the profile of our team within Urbis, because many staff feel positive about the fact that we've got an internationally recognised internal tool. Staff are now even more willing to engage with the intranet team on other initiatives."
Externally, the Award has also helped Urbis as a company:
"We've used details of the Award as part of winning submissions to gain more business in these tight economic times, and overall the intranet team feels good about the external recognition of some of our excellent work." "In addition, the effort of making a submission would have been worth it even without winning the award, because the investigations created a greater understanding of how our staff use and get value from the intranet."
Good points from Luis Suarez
Also, this past Friday, it was great to see IBMer and social software evangelist, Luis Suarez, writing about the Awards.
You've quite likely have heard about, or know, Luis and his work, especially that of dumping email for social software, which is an amazing initiative he's now been working on for over a year and one that's been going very well.
Luis quite rightly points out that, as Andrew and the Urbis team have found, entering and winning an Award presents a great opportunity to boost your team's visibility, demonstrate the great work you've done and reply to any intranet sceptics in your organisation:
"More than anything else, [the Awards] 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."
"I feel that initiatives like the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards are incredibly helpful to 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, there are several good reasons as to why you should enter. It will not take long to put together a submission, and the benefits are many.
Head over to the Awards homepage to get all the necesary information, or contact us (awards@steptwo.com.au) if you have any questions.
