Nielsen Norman Group's Intranet Design Annual 2010 reviews the year's ten best intranets. Although the price of the report is quite hefty, the summary identifies some of the key areas for which best intranet practices are presented in the report. These include things like
- Company and industry news
- Employee and department weblogs
- Onboarding of new employees
- Collaboration tools and discussion boards
- Internal wikis
- Employee self service
- Change management
- Staff directory and employee profile pages
- Corporate calendars
What is significant about these features is that they are the same as those that I identified (in my recent State of Social Learning article) as significant aspects of social learning within an organisation.
At the recent LT Conference, a number of organisations (notably BT) were using intranet software to power their social learning approaches; some were discarding (or thinking about discarding) their LMS altogether, as they aren't provide the full functionality to support the full range of "learning" within an organisation today.
I see this as the beginning of a significant trend in corporate learning and one that L&D departments needs to ensure they are part of. If they don't, they are likely to see their function partly or completely taken over by Bus Ops or IT - the departments that by implementing social intranets within an organisation, become the "enablers" of organisational learning.
