The 3rd Swiss Intranet Summit took place two weeks ago in Zurich. After the two conference days I asked the participants in a final interactive round what the key take-aways for them were:

• A transition from an “Intranet” to a “Digital Workplace” has to happen along 4 dimensions: Community & Collaboration, Communication & Information, Intranet Services and Structure (acc. to IBF’s Digital Workplace Maturity Model)
• The Intranet Manager is mainly a “Self Service Manager” (enabling people to do things, seeing to people getting served, …)
• The importance of a good balance between (classical) requirements analysis and workplace observation in order to discover the real needs of employees
• The importance of the factor “speed” in getting to information
• That ownership is a key success factors for internal use of Social Media
• That user’s and stakeholder’s expectations have to be actively managed
• That a task-based approach is a pre-requisite to really supporting employees in what they are doing day by day