There were live links to intranets from member such as United Utilities, Scottish Government and a video tour from BT. When digging into persona use examples came from BDO Stoy Hayward, Corus and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).

One of the many areas for deep discussion and debate was around persona use, in a session led by IBF Benchmarking Lead, Sam Marshall. Members had mixed experiences in using persona's, although all seemed to agree they are a great tool in focusing developers and publishers on the user. We talked about the process of persona development, how it can be a long, detailed and in depth process, or actually how a simple in-house workshop can produce excellent learnings for an intranet team. The act of creating persona's as a team can reveal a lot about your users you didn't know or had maybe forgotten.

Debate occurred around the use of fictional personas vs real people personas, with one member advocating the use of real people as they'd had great success in this. Those people involved had become intranet ambassadors for a new intranet.

On the second day members were invited to visit the Citi Group Centre in Canary Wharf. Citi gave us all a very open insight into their global intranet development plans, and gained lots of ideas and feedback from the membership group in return.

 

Toby Milner from BG group summed up what he got from the meeting:

 

The next IBF Member Meeting will take place in New York on 24 & 25 March with a member visit to Thomson Reuters followed by a meeting in Paris on 19 & 20 May hosted by AXA. If you are not already a member find out more information on our services and how to join the IBF exclusive community in time to attend the next meeting.