Allianz Australia Insurance, Australia has been named by internet design expert Jakob Nielsen as having one of the 10 best designed corporate intranets of 2006.
Whilst I have not seen the intranet, I suspect that Allianz has developed it at least partly for compliance and productivity reasons.
Nielsen says that a "trend this year was an increased use of training areas on intranets. The best designs often locate traditional training options and e-learning in one area. After all, from a user’s perspective, what’s important is learning — regardless of whether it takes place online or in a classroom. Many intranets also offer special training areas to help new employees learn about their new companies…
Enhancing e-learning user interface controls in this manner is important: people often feel disoriented or frustrated when tutorials take over their screens and don’t allow them the freedoms normally inherent in the Web (and intranet) user experiences."
As far as ROI is concerned, Nielsen notes that IBM’s "BluePages alone is estimated to save IBM $194 million per year. Of course, smaller companies wouldn’t realize quite such large savings, but it’s certainly realistic to save an hour or more per employee per month when an intranet is redesigned for usability. At typical, fully loaded hourly rates, this often results in approximate savings of $1,000 per year for each employee — a cool million for a mid-sized company with a thousand employees."
As I’ve noted before, technology is not the only answer to compliance. But if it can be designed to encourage employees to use it, compliance (and productivity) will increase.
UPDATE 17 February 2006: Allianz Australia says that their intranet was built in-house based on comments from employee focus groups which wanted their intranet to be a practical, everyday tool with a consistent look and feel, simple navigation tools, short cuts and company news. Their press release contains a screenshot of the intranet home page. There is also a link to a story about their internal e-learning program.
