CHALLENGE
With a need to collaborate, share knowledge, and communicate company information to a dispersed workforce, our client recognized that their current corporate intranet could no longer support the company’s operational or employee needs. Their existing intranet was outdated, had an architecture that couldn’t manage a content load that had tripled in size since it's original design, did not support information discoverability, and was hosted on an aging server environment. The site also did not adequately support the company's open culture; information was being “pushed” to employees through the intranet and re-duplicated and pushed again by global e-mails rather than allowing information to be dispensed and consumed via a more user-driven, social model leveraging user generated content, blogs, discussion boards, or wikis. An additional challenge was that the site needed to support two core audiences with different needs; client-facing employees in the field, who used the site primarily to access administrative information and documents, locate co-workers or read corporate communications, and internal support teams who leveraged it to publish information to field employees and coordinate their work efforts on team collaboration sites.
SOLUTION
To solve these challenges, Allyis’ consulting and technology development teams designed a new corporate intranet solution on the SharePoint 2007 platform, that achieved the following goals:
More stable server environment
Site architecture allowing for future growth
Improved information discoverability
Improved communication channels
Promotes user engagement and content creation via social computing features, tool and technologies
The project began with user and stakeholder interviews to gain a deeper awareness of how employees and management currently engaged with the existing intranet and what their needs were. The information gathered from this research drove many new site features including:
Enhanced Employee Finder Tool: The ability to surface employee information, particularly in a dispersed workforce, surfaced as a key need, and drove the requirements for an enhanced Employee Finder tool that allows a search across the entire employee population using defined filters.
Home Page Dashboard: Since most employees were unfamiliar with using out-of-the-box SharePoint functionality like Alerts and Bookmarks, Allyis developed a user “dashboard” area on the home page of the intranet that integrated such functionality making it easily accessible and manageable for end users.
Employee Spotlight: As an employee-focused company, with a strong sense of community, it was important, especially given the dispersed nature of it's employee base, to find a ways to foster that sense of community by building virtual connections between employees. Out of this need, a "Spotlight On" feature was developed on the home page of site where an employee profile is always highlighted to introduce employees to each other virtually.
You Ask, We Answer: Building on the organization's culture of openness and transparency, it was important to management that the site nurtured dialog between employees and leadership. To help serve this need, a "You Ask, We Answer" message board was developed where employees can post questions (anonymously or not) for the leadership team, who have committed to responding within 24 hours.
A Blog For All Employees: Also in support of the organization's culture of transparency and focus on open employee management dialog, a new blog platform was launched providing a new, non-email-based, platform for management to communicate to the organization and allowing employees to directly comment and provide feedback to management posts or create their own blogs to communicate their ideas, opinions and insights within the organization.
User Friendly Publishing Desk: The company wanted to make sure that once the new intranet was built and launched, it would be easy for them to update and maintain. To serve this requirement, a simple, user friendly publishing desk was developed where non-technical, business owners can easily publish or edit site content in real-time without having to engage valuable internal development or IT resources to support day-to-day publishing needs.
The development of this new corporate intranet site and features does not end here. Allyis is currently building out team sites to house content, discussions, blogs, and resources for specific departments and project groups within the same intranet environment and user testing continues to ensure the focus of future development efforts are aligned to user expectations and needs.
KEY BENEFITS
Improved Knowledge & Information Discovery: Utilizing tools like search, tagging, best bets, Employee Finder, tag-based search, customized alerts tagging, and a ‘What’s New’ feed allows for easier access to information.
Streamlined Operations & Efficiencies: The publishing desk provides the ability to publish and edit content in real-time, reducing the amount of time and resources needed to get content up.
Improved Communication & Collaboration: Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and messaging allow for improved collaboration and communication across the organization's dispersed workforce.
SERVICES
The Allyis team provided end-to-end support, including:
