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IBM’s Intranet One of the World’s Top Ten


WEBWIRE

Nielsen Norman Group Recognizes IBM Employee Portal in 2005 Report on Best Intranets

ARMONK, NY - 26 Jan 2006: IBM’s intranet -- known inside the company as the “w3 On Demand Workplace,” -- has been selected as one of “The Year’s 10 Best Intranets” by the Nielsen Norman Group, a user experience research firm that advises companies on human-centered product and service design. IBM is the only information technology company recognized in this year’s report.
Commenting on IBM’s intranet, usability expert Jakob Nielsen, principal, Nielsen Norman Group, said: “Designers took an aggressive yet realistic approach, creating and enforcing meticulous intranet design standards to maintain a consistent design, and using personalization to ensure the right information reaches the right people.”
“The w3 On Demand Workplace is a powerful productivity and collaboration tool for 329,000 IBM employees in 75 countries,” said Brian Truskowski, vice president and chief information officer, IBM. “Our intranet has evolved into an integrating platform that accelerates the speed with which we can find resources and knowledge to help our clients innovate and succeed.”
Among the features Nielsen Norman recognized:
Personalization of news -- Based on self-created profiles, employees receive internal and external news tailored to their jobs and interests.
Role-specific portlets -- Job-specific portlets are available for employees in finance, sales, and management. This means all the tools and applications these employees need for their particular function are available directly from their IBM intranet home page.
Employee directory -- “If the average employee directory is a hill, the IBM BluePages would be the Matterhorn... with a plethora of features and pertinent information, the IBM BluePages is probably the most robust intranet employee directory we have ever encountered,” Nielsen Norman’s report says. BluePages facilitates collaboration by allowing IBMers to find each other more easily. Using this tool, IBMers can even search for other employees based on their areas of expertise.
Blogging -- Through BlogCentral, IBM Employees can share their ideas by creating their own blogs, or subscribe to each other’s blogs via RSS.
Accessibility -- The site is designed to be easy to use for people with disabilities, including older users, users with motor-related disabilities, memory or literacy issues, or low vision.
Other Nielsen Norman Group award-winners this year include Allianz Australia Insurance Ltd. (Australia), ALTANA Pharma AG (Germany), Bank of Ireland (Ireland), Capital One (US), Merrill Lynch (US), METRO Group (Germany), O2 (UK), Staples Inc. (US), and Vodafone Group plc (Germany).

About IBM
IBM is the world’s largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of on demand business. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com.

About Nielsen Norman Group
Nielsen Norman Group (http://www.nngroup.com) is a user-experience research firm that advises companies on how to succeed through the human-centered design of products and services. Nielsen Norman Group principals Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini are each world-renowned experts in usability and human use of technology. Besides authoring books and evangelizing about user experience, they and the other user-experience specialists at Nielsen Norman Group offer high-level strategic consultation on usability of websites, consumer products, software designs and anything else that needs to be easy to use.



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