Global intranets, right at my desk

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

If part of your role as a comms practitioner involves looking after the intranet, then I expect you would have heard about the Intranet Benchmarking Forum's IBF24, which took place over Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Caffeine burnt, not carbon
The event, essentially 24 hours of webcast presentations, discussion panels, thought-pieces, case studies and more, brought together some of the best intranets out there including the BBC, American Electric Power, IKEA, Nokia, IBM, Shell, British Airways, SAP, AMP and Sara Lee.

I only managed to log in for a couple of hours but the whole process – audio via phone dial-in, slides via LiveMeeting – worked perfectly. No mean feat considering it was co-ordinated by various members of the IBF team scattered across the world.

Watching a presentation by Abigail Lewis-Bowen (former intranet Manager at IBM), we heard about potential future trends for the intranet, including:

The rising importance of the intranet: while global business integration continues to expand, environmental challenges will restrain commuting and air travel. Work therefore will become both more globalised and also more remote.

The mobile intranet will grow as bandwidth costs drop and device interfaces improve, along with mobile intranet applications that leverage semantically enabled data.

Virtual, collaborative work technologies will thrive and improve, including a growth in telepresence.

Increasing environmental awareness will foster the concept of the "Ecoprise", where companies will use the intranet to drive a culture of corporate responsibility and sustainability, and adoption of related tools and applications.

A presentation by the team at AMP was next. Their Vignette 7 installation features a formal and informal web, with formal content being official, informal being the conversational type of content found on one of the many internal blogs.

I posted about this session on Twitter, tagging everything "IBF24". You can see the whole stream here.

AMP goes formal and informal
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the AMP presentation was the fact that the internet and intranet teams are discussing how they can work and unify efforts and developments. With a common concern and challenge being that the pace of internet development is leaving corporate systems further in its wake, this is a typically pro-active strategy from the AMP team.

24
Given the IBF's growing presence (the organization's Asia-Pacific region launched earlier this year), the event's regional turnover was a nice twist, even meaning quite a few people stayed up well beyond bedtime as the clock ticked round. While I only got a couple of hours, I understand KM Review editor Jessica Twentyman heard a fair bit more and will have interviews published in the near future, and there's plenty of blog action around it, not least the IBF24 site and NING network.

Paul Levey also kept a blog throughout the event, and feedback overall seems very positive.

Face to face is best, but this is pretty good too
This type of event is a great idea. You get a lot of the value of an international conference, with little of the effort or cost.

Of course, nothing beats face to face events. Melcrum's own Intranet 2.0 Forum at Disneyworld, Florida, had great reviews, and the UK's event is next week (get more info here), but hearing about stuff like this in audio and visual channels is a good way to deal with the realities of a globalised world.