Jacob Nielsen has just published his thoughts on the 10 Best Intranets for 2009. Now I’ve been following Nielsen for a number of years and his intranet rankings too while leading teams that designed intranets for 30,000 employee plus companies and publishing best practice reports. Needless to say, I know the intranet space well and have an opinion on it.

I invariably feel that the Nielsen rankings are more a reflection of how he defines the intranet space than what denotes a best intranet. The reason is that his definitions of what an intranet is, how it should be measured and results are all left a tad bit vague for me. Don’t get me wrong, the intranets he chooses are stellar and his guidance is strong but there some opinions of his that I contest. So here’s a critical look at some of the points that he’s highlighted in the article where he introduces the top intranets.  

The biggest trend that he sees is in the growth in the number of employees supporting an intranet. That seems strange to me. I would have thought that with the move towards social applications and self organization, the core team supporting the intranet would have gotten smaller rather than larger. Is his opinion based on a statistically significant sample of all intranets or based on the composition of submissions?

Nielsen argues that intranets are getting more strategic by virtue of their team sizes, reporting lines and the functionality on them. I agree they’re getting more strategic but I think that’s largely because intranets are integrating with the other parts of an enterprise infrastructure. Also, the intranets are now knowledge management and social network driven tools more than ever capturing the tacit information that resides in people’s heads. That’s what’s making them strategic too. Its important to remember that its not just about team sizes, reporting lines and rich uses profiles. They matter but there’s more to the story.

I like the attention being given to the social network and collaboration features in the article. CEO blogging also gets a mention. That’s along the lines of what I’ve been seeing in the intranet space too. And quite frankly, these are obvious trends. What I do wonder about it is the participation from employees on the CEO blogs. Also, does the CEO blogging replace top down email communication? I was a little surprised to see no mention of wikis. Why was that? Are they not getting enough attention or are they badly implemented. I’d be interested in learning more about that.

The article also talks about personalization and customization taking hold. That makes sense but I must admit the type of personalization being discussed is still rather rudimentary. Customizing links, and creating customized reports are intranet elements that I’ve seen for years. Those are important but I’ve started to see a lot more from intranets – personalization driven by the composition of a person’s social network and usage patterns, customization based on the time period (end of quarter versus a normal day) etc. I’m surprised that some of those more advanced solutions don’t get mentioned.

And lastly, I found the extrapolation about Sharepoint intranets unusual. Don’t get me wrong, Sharepoint is a great platform for intranets but as with a lot of the other thoughts in the article by Nielsen, I think it is unfair to generalize about the state of all intranets without talking about sample sizes and being statistically significant with the data.

So here’s my plea – next year please share the total number of submissions for the awards, the countries from where the submissions came from and categorize the submissions by size (employees using the intranet). Without that data, it is hard to pay too much attention to this list of the 10 Best Intranets for 2009.

It is worth noting that my agency did not submit any intranets for the awards last year. We do buy the reports often because they’re still insightful.