Jakob Nielsen, called the guru of web page design by the New York Times, just published his report, 10 Best Intranets of 2010.

Three points from the report stand out for me.

Mobile access Only 30% of winners had mobile enabled intranets. This is low compared to many world wide websites. The report sees this as a growth area.

Social networking tools Social media tools were common on the winning intranets. This included features for both employees as individuals and workgroup connections.

Emergency Preparedness 40% of the winning intranets had integrated some features for use in crisis situations. Some winners had learned from experiences with previous disasters like Hurricane Katrina. The inclusion of emergency preparedness indicates intranets are becoming a key part of the enterprise, communication infrastructure.

What can you do with this info?  Plan to integrate these winning features into your intranet and external website.   I know I’m extrapolating from a report on intranets to external websites, but the reports acknowledges faster adoption of these tools and techniques on external websites.  So,  if your enterprise lags in either arena, start planning.

This report reinforces something I say all the time.  You have to be where the people are. Seems obvious enough.  The report says people are increasingly in two places – on their smartphones and on social networks.

More people are using smartphones in their personal lives and in their business lives.   So whether it is for business or pleasure, the tool is there.  The smartphone is the “forth” screen after Big screen, the TV screen, and the computer screen.  You have to be where the people are.  This is just as true for your external customer as it is for your widely dispersed, mobile workforce.

As the use of the world wide social web grows, the thought of connecting and collaborating through social networks will become less novelty and more reality.  Enterprises can plan now to enable workgroups to be more engaged, involved, and  productive.

On the last point, Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “… plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  Nobody can have the perfect plan for an emergency, but the process of planning for it will be invaluable.  So start planning how to leverage your website and intranet during an emergency.

Be where the people are – mobile and social media; leverage web technologies during emergencies.  These are what top businesses are doing.  What are you doing?

Critical mass – New definition: When the comments to a post add as much value as the original post. See Jeff Jarvis’ post on Google SideWiki. Scroll through the comments. He clearly has critical mass. The discussion in the comments is as important as the original content.

That’s where the rub is. Google just introduced the SideWiki to the mix. Where you may have had a vibrant community commenting on your website where all visitors to your site could see the discussion, Google’s SideWiki may start to siphon off some of the comments. Commentors will have to choose where to leave their comments. Comments may live in two places. Two separate communities may begin to evolve around a website. You may have comments on your website and you may have comments that exist only in Google SideWiki. If you were close to critical mass before, you just hit a major set back.

Google’s SideWiki is new. The full effect has not been realized yet. It is, however, something website owners need to be aware of. Community and critical mass are the target.

While cleaning up my files, I ran across my “rules for survival.”  These have been evolving since I turned 20.  Yes, that’s a long time ago.  Here is one “rule” written in pencil on the tattered list…

“When things are at their absolute worst, that’s when the least amount of extra effort will pay the largest dividends.” 

When things are good, it is easy to work long and hard.  It may even be fun.  But, everyone else is working hard too, so your efforts as compared to your competition will not have as big an effect.  Mathematically, when you put in 110 units of work when everyone is putting in 100, you are only 10% ahead. 

It is when the situation is so bad that nobody wants to do anything, that any extra effort can swing the tide.   When things look terribly bleak, or it is too cold to move, or everyone is too exhausted to do anything,  that is exactly the time when your effort will be leveraged many times bringing you out ahead of your competition.  If your competitors are sulking around feeling hopeless and only putting in 5 units of work waiting for better times to return, and you put in only 10 units of work, you will be 100% ahead of your competition. 

Who doesn’t want to be 100% ahead of the competition in the business arena?  

The trick of leadership is to show that the deepest, darkest, bleakest moment may yield the greatest reward with some extra effort.

I am working on a special project at my airline.  As part of the training, we had a review of Threat and Error management.  It is a tool used to improve safety at many airlines.  Here is the really short version…

Threats are those things that we don’t have control over.  These can be environmental, operational, and more; that’s weather, traffic, mechanical problems…

 Errors are just that – things we do wrong.  We can make procedural errors, judgement errors, and more.

 I’m being purposefully vague in my terms because I really think there is a cross-over into other businesses.  Here’s what I mean.  Every business should survey the landscape for possible threats and have a plan for those threats when they do occur.  The business should have a method to identify those threats when they do appear.  Similarly, identification is the key to internal errors.  You have to identify them before you can take action to correct them.

It’s said quite often in the aviation business that no one single item caused an accident, but rather a chain of events.   If any link in the chain could have been broken, the accident could have been prevented.  

So, the take away:  Do you have systems to identify the external threats and the internal errors in your business?  Do you have processes to mitigate the potential threats and errors?