It  goes without saying that innovation is a process that will be forever in motion. Whatever its speed may be, technology is eternally, invariably moving forward. So when it comes to discussing technology, the conversation inevitably turns to the subject of the latest advancement or to predictions of the next big step forward.

The questions, "What's new?" and "What's next?" are especially salient in the field of intranets, where technologies, tools, implementations, and integrations are never quite as far along as perhaps they might be, since the outward-facing online environments tend to take up most of an organization's figurative bandwidth.

Consultants, vendors, and intranet stakeholders go to great lengths to educate their constituents on the latest advances and to encourage intranet innovation. It's not hard to get your hands on a report or an article outlining the most up-to-date intranet best practices-look no further than the newsletter you're holding in your hands (or viewing on your desktop or tablet). Consulting firms such as Australia's Step Two Designs Pty Ltd. even issue annual slates of intranet awards designed to highlight the impressive accomplishments of a few standout intranet innovators in the hope of inspiring others to follow in their footsteps.

What follows is an overview of the accumulated knowledge, analysis-and maybe just a dash of tough love-from the last year in intranets. Experts from across the globe have answered the questions, "What's the latest standard in intranet technology?" and "What's the next great intranet innovation on the horizon?" They've also provided specific examples of some of the intranet implementations they think are particularly exciting. So join us on this guided tour of the latest intranet innovations. It just might revolutionize the way your organization does business.

WHAT'S THE NEW STANDARD?

Knowledge Management

It may come as no surprise that Seth Earley, the president and CEO of the firm Earley & Associates, Inc., who has been implementing content management and knowledge management projects for nearly a decade and a half, believes that the latest additions to the list of baseline intranet functionalities are knowledge-management-related. Principal among these is what he calls "search as an application." It's no longer excusable, he says, for an intranet to employ a staid, static search box that surfaces a long, unwieldy list of responses. "Search is about providing advanced features and functions that look like navigation but provide advanced capabilities that leverage search mechanisms and functionality under the hood," Earley says. "These include attribute-based navigation, associative relationships from thesaurus structures, best bets, and content constructed on the fly based on various user parameters."

Just as it's important for search to be more than a "white box," Earley says that a user's interaction with an intranet must be tailored to his or her own unique needs, interests, and work habits. "Part of the user experience is presenting content very dynamically based on the things that people are doing and how their needs change as they progress through the site," he says. "Content is assembled in combinations that may never have existed before based on complex content object models and metadata tags on components that allow users to make choices that serve up information from multiple systems [and] in creative ways [that] react to their context."

Context, here, is key. This style of context-based searching has been implemented to much success on the web-for instance, a Google search that surfaces a map and a list of your local pizzerias when you search "pizza," rather than search results that are generic to everyone. The technology is out there, and it's working; Earley sees it as a new standard for a truly functional intranet.

"It's about providing the correct context for user experience," Earley says. "It's about surfacing content in context of work tasks, about presenting content to users in anticipation of their needs. Search as an application and dynamic content provide content in context."

Social Networking

It's time to face it: Your employees are probably spending at least a portion of their otherwise productive workday on Facebook. It's time to draw them into your intranet with the same alluring social features that keep them coming back to that most ubiquitous social networking site. (But don't worry; your organization stands to gain from it too.)

Rebecca Rodgers, senior consultant at Step Two Designs, says that her firm declared that basic social tools had become an intranet standard as far back as 2010. "We have continued to see this trend," she says, "but what is clear ... is that the ‘social' element is starting to gradually change the whole tone of the intranet."

Sam Marshall, director of ClearBox Consulting in the U.K., agrees. He encourages those organizations that have still not taken the social networking plunge to shake off their anxieties and go for it.
"This may seem old hat as a concept, but organizations so far have been reluctant to drive ahead with this," he says, "often due to uncertainties around privacy, employment law, or union reaction. Now, finally, it seems to have become an expectation that an intranet would have it."

Marshall points to IBM's Beehive as a prime example of an intranet that has implemented social networking to great effect. Beehive is an internal site that gives IBMers a "‘rich connection to the people they work with' on both a personal and a professional level," according to IBM's website. The site contains many of the components of a Facebook-style social network--a status message field, an About Me section, a section for photos. The site also includes a section for listing called "hive fives," which are users' thoughts on any topic of their choosing. These lists-which aren't necessarily work-related, but often are-can be viewed, searched, and used by other members of the organization to gather information and use knowledge that they might not otherwise have access to. Beehive also facilitates conference calls and meetings. It provides an infrastructure for scheduling, announcing those events, and providing participants an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the other participants on the call, whom they may not already know, by viewing their Beehive profiles.

According to our experts, social networking is here to stay as a new standard-indeed, a basic expectation-of intranet functionality. And the consensus is that it may be the feature that at long last provides the compelling reason for employees to spend real, meaningful time on the company intranet.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Mobile

Just as it's widely accepted that social networking is the new intranet ideal, experts and analysts agree that the next generation of intranets will need to take a page or two from the mobile handbook.
Step Two's Rodgers pointed out two of the winners of her organization's Intranet Innovation Awards for 2011 as having demonstrated how much of an impact mobile technology can have on an organization when it's implemented into the intranet: Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia and the U.K. Parliament.

In the case of U.K. Parliament, Step Two's report applauded its mobile intranet for giving members of Parliament "access to the latest news, details of what is happening in the chambers and committees, and other carefully selected features [that have] helped an extremely busy user population access the information they really need when they are away from their desks."

The QUT was singled out for its tactic of "cherry picking only the applications and content that are essential" to streamline the mobile intranet, according to the award citation on Step Two's website. Rodgers says that Step Two's Intranet Innovation Awards are intended to "give intranet teams the recognition they deserve as well as sharing great ideas that others may be able to apply in their organizations." She notes that QUT and U.K. Parliament are two excellent models for other organizations to follow for inspiration for their own experiments in mobile intranet technology.

Apps

Along with implementing a mobile intranet solution, the next generation of intranets will feature app-style programs developed in-house for employees to use to execute specific tasks on-the-go. ClearBox Consulting's Marshall points to Standard Chartered Bank, an international bank that has created its own internal applications, enabling managers to monitor financial trades and employees to keep track of
foreign exchange rates. So impressive is Standard Chartered's apps implementation that even Apple has featured the bank on its iPad in Business page.

Whether it's the new standards for today (enhanced knowledge management and social engagement) or tomorrow (mobile, apps, and whatever comes next), innovations in intranets will march on, ceaselessly forward. All we can do is try to keep up.