Fintech is an interesting area and lots is happening. This is both with the extranet and intranet. Jakob Nielsen has put together this list of the best intranets to look out for this year and it makes for enlightening reading.
10 Best Intranets of 2018
by Kara Pernice, Amy Schade, and Patty Caya on January 7, 2018
Topics:
Summary: The winners of our 17th Intranet Design Annual came from smaller organizations, had smaller intranet teams who relied on internal resources and external help to create the best intranets.
Following are the organizations with the 10 best-designed intranets for 2018:
- American Medical Association (US), a national organization providing resources for physicians, residents, and medical students
- Archer Malmo (US), one of the largest independently owned full-service advertising agencies in the United States
- Capital Power (Canada), a North American power producer
- Delta Air Lines (US), one of the world’s largest global airlines
- eBay, Inc. (US), a multinational commerce company operating through its Marketplace, StubHub, and Classifieds platforms to connect millions of sellers with more than 169 million active buyers around the world
- GSK (UK), a science-led company that researches, develops, and manufactures innovative pharmaceutical medicines, vaccines, and consumer healthcare products
- Maple Leaf Foods Inc. (Canada), a food manufacturer
- PKP Energetyka S.A. (Poland), an energy company
- Travelers Insurance (US), one of the oldest insurance organizations in the United States
- UN World Food Programme (Italy), a leading humanitarian organization fighting hunger and working toward the global goal of ending hunger by 2030
North America Still Commanding
Seven of the ten winning teams hail from North America, with five from the U.S. and two from Canada. We have one winner form the U.K.; and this year Poland makes a showing for the second time in our winning set, and Italy makes its third showing.
NonProfits and Utilities are Strong This Year
Since our first Intranet Design Annual in 2001, 10 nonprofits have been among the winners, and two of those are from this year. Might this represent an upturn in intranet budget and perceived importance of intranets at nonprofit organizations?
Utilities remain the most winning industry, with 28, that’s 16%, of winners since the start of this contest. This year two utilities make our list. Technology and Finance are still among the strongest winners, each with two winners this year.
While eBay is placed under the “technology” industry umbrella, it is the first ecommerce organization to win.
Speedy Development
Intranet development timelines are getting shorter. This year’s average of 14 months (or 1.2 years) is the shortest yet for our Intranet Design Annual winners. Since 2014, the average intranet project has taken 16.1 months, or 1.3 years; as opposed to the average from 2001 to present, which is 33.6 months or 2.8 years.
Today’s intranet projects often involve iterative development, which makes it hard to calculate project time as sites are in a state of constant improvement.
Faster development strategies, such as Agile, contribute to shorter times, as do continually improving website development tools. For example, 2 of this year’s winners used “intranet-in-a-box” solutions that were quickly deployed in 7 and 10 months, respectively.
Average Years Spent Creating Intranets: 2001–2018. Teams created this year’s winning sites in an average of 14 months (1.2 years). This continues the trend that began in 2014, with winning intranets taking less than 1.5 years on average to be created. In contrast, from 2001 to 2013, winning intranet teams took an average of 33.6 months, or just under 3 years, to complete their redesigns.
Smaller Winning Organizations
The median company size of this year’s winners was 13,000 employees, with four of our winning organizations supporting 1,000 employees or less. On average, winning teams supported 48,500 employees, ranging from 206 supported employees at Archer Malmo to 260,000 at Delta Air Lines.
Average Organization Size: 2001–2018. The winning 2018 sites supported an average of 48,500 employees, ranging from 206 employees at Archer Malmo to 260,000 at Delta Air Lines. This year’s median was 13,000 employees. (The high average in 2010 was due to winning organization Walmart’s size, with an intranet supporting 1.4 million store associates. Excluding Walmart, the average for that year was 39,100.)
Fourteen Core Team Members
The average winning intranet team comprised 14 core members. Teams sizes ranged from three at Capital Power to 22 at both American Medical Association and eBay. Three teams — Capital Power, Travelers Insurance, and the United Nations World Food Programme — had teams of seven or fewer people. These numbers reflect the core intranet teams, as opposed to extended teams, which might include content authors or short-term project members. Core teams comprised internal and external staff and full- or part-time employees.
Average Intranet Team Size: 2001–2018. In 2018, the average team size was 14 members
Although this year’s winning organizations supported a small average number of employees, it is encouraging to see a slight increase in the average team size compared to past years’ data. However, these teams are still relatively small. Given the intranet’s importance — both for communicating internally and completing daily work — intranet teams should be generously staffed.
Relatively small team sizes can be the result of faster implementation and stronger intranet creation tools. Still, it is essential that teams receive the staff, funding, and management support they need to do the important work of creating a usable, effective intranet. Also, these team numbers reflect the number of employees working on the intranet redesign; often, even fewer employees remain dedicated to intranet maintenance, governance, and iterative development after the major redesign effort is complete.
Team Size Relative to the Number of Employees the Intranet Supports
We also consider team size relative to organization size for these winning designs. Intranet teams are special in that a small number of people can have a huge impact on everyone at the organization. For example, the American Medical Association team had 22 people supporting 1,000 users, while the eBay team also had 22 people, but supported 20 times more users (21,000).
As a percentage, this year’s teams comprised 0.029% of company size. That is, for every 10,000 employees, 2.9 worked on the intranet team.
Team Size as a Percentage of Company Size: 2001–2018. This year’s winning intranet teams comprised 0.029% of the people they support.
To further explore the relationship between organization and team sizes, we compared team size to company size over the past 10 Intranet Design Annuals. We found that our winning intranets have a similar intranet support ratio, or percentage of employees who work on the intranet team.
The rather complex formula below summarizes the relationship between team size and organization size for winning Intranet Design Annual teams. The intranet support ratio formula is:
Intranet support ratio = 9.0154 * number of employees-0.974
That is, you take the number of employees the intranet supports and raise it to the power of -0.974. You then multiply the resulting number by 9.0154 to get the expected intranet support ratio. This ratio, multiplied by the number of employees, results in a team size. (The equation explains 89% of the variability in intranet support ratios.)
As complex at this equation is, in practice, it breaks down to simply team sizes of 10–13 people as follows:
|
Number of employees at winning organizations |
Size of winning intranet team |
|
100 |
10.2 |
|
1,000 |
10.8 |
|
10,000 |
11.5 |
|
100,000 |
12.2 |
|
500,000 |
12.7 |
The intranet support ratio equation explains 89% of the variability in intranet support ratios. This effect is visible in the chart, which plots the numbers on a double logarithmic scale.
We use this equation as a sanity check, and to derive a suggested minimum team size. We are not recommending that intranet teams have 10 to 12 people. In fact, this year’s winners had 14 team members, on average. Teams may need many more (or in rare cases, fewer) people depending on the circumstances.
Bringing In Outside Help
Eight of this year’s winning organizations looked to outside agencies and consultants to help with the intranet redesign, bringing in an average of two agencies each.
Key areas in which teams sought help included:
- Content creation and editor training
- Development
- Discovery
- Ideation
- Information architecture
- Persona creation
- Project management
- Prototyping
- User research
- Visual design
- Wireframes
Over the years, many winning intranet teams have engaged external resources to help in their redesign project, in order to fill internal team gaps and gain outside experience and perspective.
Reliance on outside resources is a double-edged sword, however. Many winning organizations have quick development times and iterative practices, which raises a crucial question: When these short-term external resources leave, who is left to iterate, maintain, and continually improve the new site?
Number of Teams Composed of In-House and External Members: 2007–2018. This year, 8 of 10 winning organizations used outside resources in their intranet redesign project.
More details on the collaboration between in-house teams and outside firms can be found in each company’s individual profile.
Conclusion
Nonprofits and utilities lead the charge of industries with the best intranets; followed by finance and technology, which have had winning intranets for several years. Faster, iterative development is common among this year’s winners, influenced by Lean and Agile methods. Almost all of this year's winners turned to multiple consultants outside the organization for varied expertise and advanced insights. And, this year’s winners again demonstrate that whether an organization has a couple hundred employees or a couple hundred thousand employees, a great intranet can emerge.
Full Report
For more information about themes, intranet best practices, and full-color screenshots of the 10 winners, download the 2018 Intranet Design Annual. The report download comes with a folder containing each image as a .png to make it easier to zoom in on and study the designs.