As part of every intranet managers purview will be long range planning  for your intranet or digital workplace. Part of the input will be from your users and some will be from your business leaders, but will either be ambitious enough? In today’s Intranetizen post, we share insight from our industry’s thought leaders on their vision of Intranet 2015.

Beleaguered internet firm Yahoo! surprised many on Friday when it announced an end to working from home in the company.

In a memo widely leaked by disgruntled employees, Yahoo!’s Head of HR Jackie Reses explained:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Earlier this week, James Robertson at Step Two Designs published a challenge for all intranet managers — identify, plan and execute three intranet new year resolutions. Gauntlet laid down, the intranetizen team gaze ahead, scan the 2013 objectives, cast their eyes over the long range planning and plot their three resolutions for 2013.

Last January we predicted a drive for home working, a push to get social with SharePoint, a need to prove the worth of intranet of today (with metrics), and a swing in investment to search and find-ability over ‘pushing’ news. And we were mostly right (phew!).

So what about this year? Lets turn off the lights, spin around three times and jab wildly into the darkness of the future (sorry… we’re probably still drunk). Yes, it’s our annual post in which we become sages and try and predict what the next 12 months have in store for intranets, digital workplaces and the good people that work on them.

A year ago, Team Intranetizen had a punt on what we felt would be the biggest changes in the intranet industry in 2012.  So were we right? Let’s take a look back at those and see if we were on the money.

Gamification – applying game design thinking to non-game applications – has certainly been the buzzword of 2012, with some analysts predicting that by 2013 half of all business initiatives will have gamified processes. But the response from digital workplace specialists has been more muted, with many of our blog commenters finding real-life implentations underwhelming at best.

As the Enterprise Gamification Forum kicks off this week over in San Diego, we’re taking a closer look at gamification and asking if it really has a place on your intranet.