Conference Review: Intranatverk Gothenburg 2015

The Intranetizen team is very fortunate to attend a number of conferences each year and we do our best to write them up to you can learn what we learnt, but also so you can get a feel for the best way to spend your conference dollars in future years. This event, run by intranet and enterprise search expert Kristian Norling is small but perfectly formed.

CONFERENCE STRUCTURE

This is a packed one-day conference with a series of specialist workshops run the day before. Conferences like this always have a nice feel to them: some of the presented topics have been discussed in some detail beforehand and attendees may have met, so there’s an air of familiarity in the room. What was unfamiliar were the speakers. With the exception of a few well-known speakers, I was delighted to see that the agenda had new insights from a variety of people and organisations I’d never heard from before. This is great – the conference circuit needs more voices.

OUR CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Keeping the agenda to 20 minute presentations meant that the agenda was fast paced and contained lots of great case studies from which to learn. Highlights from the day:

Mölnlycke Healthcare demonstrated their recent intranet which combined the content management systems from EPiServer and the document library and social features of SharePoint. This is an all-to-common scenario where businesses attempt to combine best-in-class services together into a heterogeneous intranet matrix. I admired this piece of work and was hugely grateful I wasn’t involved in it. One other notable highlight of their work was the use of an internal ‘twitter style’ service which appeared well used and allowed all employees to quickly share their experiences.

Dedicated section for management internal tweets. Like. I can imagine the resistance. #intranatverk pic.twitter.com/hBHzIR0SnS

— Jonathan Phillips (@DigitalJonathan) May 21, 2015

I was very interested to hear the inside story behind the Tauron intranet (called Tauronet) from Edisonda, the agency who delivered the work – you can see it yourself on thebestintranet.com website (by the way, NICE work with the URL here too!) There was some nice thinking behind the process here too – thorough, but quick. I’ll be applying some of this to my future work.

I like this. Very clear thinking #intranatverk pic.twitter.com/TQjQBNhbKG

— Jonathan Phillips (@DigitalJonathan) May 21, 2015

Sitra’s promise to employees (an intranet charter) and the “This is out of date” button on every intranet page allow employees to be part of a continual content audit. This was very well received by everyone at Intranatverk.

Other honourable mentions to the teams from COWI and Castellum. I also enjoyed Sara Redin’s presentation but still feel there’s a place for cakes in the intranet cycle!

LOGISTICS

The conference, based at the Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg, was a one-room affair, but plenty big enough, bright and good air-conditioning; these things really matter when everyone carries so many devices for recording their notes in the meetings.  The agenda afforded plenty of short breaks between speakers with teas, coffees and snacks readily on hand.

Lunch was great and also allowed us a sneaky view of the pitch and stadium. Well, you can’t come all this way and not take a look!

GETTING THERE

I’m pretty sure most of the attendees were local to Gothenburg, or at least to Sweden so their journeys to the conference were probably a little easier than mine. However, Gothenburg has regular flights from London and other European hubs and is just a 40min, 100SEK journey by bus into the centre of the city. Like so many Scandinavian cities, it’s all very walkable – 15 mins from the central station and you’re at the venue.

WHAT INTRANETIZEN THINKS

Small but perfectly formed. Nice mixture of stories, plenty of new voices and experiences to learn from. Nice use of the Lightning Talk vendor talks to make them earn their sponsorship.