A funny, striking conclusion that Nielsen draws is that smaller organizations have better intranets. He has now established this fact for the third year in a row. 'Small' is relative - of the 10 best intranets, the smallest serves 550 employees. But that still makes it a medium-sized company. After that, it quickly shoots towards 2,000 employees or more.
Intranet teams are getting bigger
The average intranet team has grown by 15 people. Especially when compared to 2001: teams are 6x as big in 2012. (Nielsen uses the size of the intranet team as a percentage of the number of employees in the organization.)
Mobile intranet
Mobile intranet
Nielsen extensively discusses the developments around mobile intranet. The number of organizations in belgium phone number list his list that had a (good) mobile intranet doubled last year, this year it has dropped back to 10%. Nielsen distinguishes 3 probable reasons for the fact that mobile intranet does not seem to gain a firm foothold:
Intranet teams do not have the budget or capacity required to develop anything other than the standard intranet
Unless an organization has mandated, boss-issued mobile devices, it’s hard for intranet teams to choose a device to focus on . So they don’t choose. My colleague Christiaan Lustig will discuss a possible solution to this in his article on mobile intranet, the next in the series: a responsive intranet .
Nielsen also mentions developing an intranet that works on all devices as a possible solution. But, he says, referring to the usability guidelines for mobile websites and apps , it is still wise to create a separate design if it really wants to be usable and useful for employees. That means that there are 2 sites, which means more management capacity.
From decentralized to central management
Nielsen sees that the yo-yo – which is the decentralized vs. central management discussion – is swinging back to 'central' this time. Precisely because it is becoming easier for people to start their own community or team site, new organizational silos are emerging. And organizations with "compartmentalized content run the risk of having duplicate, outdated, or incorrect information that's not included in the intranet-wide search or in the main IA. In other words, information is nearly impossible to find" , he warns. Central management is therefore (again) necessary.