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Johan Hillebrand, Head of Internal Communication at ABN/Amro. Two main challenges Communications has: information overload (too much email…) and they couldn’t find information. Another thing that was mentioned was: stop paper communication, move to digital. They decided to take on these challenges by building a new intranet. Goals for the new intranet: Fewer channels Offer relevant information Centralize content They choose to have the intranet look a lot like their internet site. No complaints about confusing the intranet for the internet yet. (They launched a couple of weeks ago.) They kept the look and feel very simple. They combine general and local news. They assume people have 10 minutes to read news and cluster that in a box. ABN has a separate social media platform (not integrated in the intranet). It's called Arena. It was built by one of their contractors. They plan to integrate it into the intranet in the future. But the look-and-feel is the same. They piloted withi...

Helen McCarthy, eCommunications Manager at Nestle. Nestle is a huge organization. 280000 employees at Nestle (100000 in factory), 449 factories, operations in 83 countries. Nestle runs their old portal on SAP. Of course they also have email, fileshares, etc. What they needed was collaboration, up-to-date content, reduced information overload, transactions/workflows, global vs local communications, ability to target, confidentiality/security. They set up a new portal based on SAP. One landing page, showing relevant information to the employee. But the employee couldn’t decide if he/she wanted something else targeted to him/her. The targeting was too restrictive. The technology was as well. So, they had a Kit-Kat break! ;-) They now want to model their intranet around their internet site. Their internet works and won awards. It was built on Sharepoint and so the intranet will be as well. They're aiming for the iPad as the standard of usability. Nestle's intranet will have the em...

Jenni Laajarinne of Amer Sports Corporation is the first speaker today! 6300 employees. Amer Sports is behind brands as Wilson, Atomic, Salomon and Suunto. Her talk will focus on using social media applications to encourage community-thinking. She has a case example of our organization using and internal social media application to encourage community thinking in the year that marked the company’s 60 th anniversary. They have home-grown CMS, created by IT. They have 6 brand intranet and 4 business area intranets. These intranets are pretty autonomous: the look-and-feel is different, the structure is different, etc. They were looking for a fun and exciting way to celebrate the company’s anniversary. They wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate the employee’s passion for sports. They set up an intranet page to share their sports moments. It ran for 3 months (so it should be simple to use for there is no time for adoption!) and there was a monthly prize. Employees could upload tex...

Next speaker: Stein-Ivar Aarsaether, ABB Global Web Management. ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies. 117000 employees. ABB has a long history (founded in 1883 after lots of mergers). ABB’s intranet is a traditional CMS-intranet, based on Lotus Notes. In 2002 they were one of the top-ten intranets of the year (Nielsen). Problems they have: Hard to find information and services you’re looking for Difficult to keep content updated Lack of collaboration tools They organized an ABB Intranet Conference in 2007. In 2009 they decided to go with Sharepoint 2010. In 2010 they launched the 1 st version. Every couple of months they launch a new version. ABB uses Google Search. A new section in their intranet (based on SP 2010) allows employees to follow feeds of other employees (like Twitter). But it could be more interactive, like Facebook. For instance if you comment on someone’s feed he/she doesn’t see that… Commenting on activity stream in SP is not out-of-the-box...

Wolfgang Jastrowski of Swiss Re is up next. They use Jive for their intranet platform (out-of-the-box). The interesting fact is that they don’t train users. Wolfgang is from IT. They provided the platform and have users decide how to use it. Blogging has not taken off as well as they thought. So they created roundtable to increase blogging. How did they introduce social media tools inside? In 2008 the company realized that collaboration is key. They wanted a community centric collaboration approach. Objectives: Better support virtual teamwork Boost information sharing across functions Accelerate agility and responsiveness Advance innovation and solution creation Etc. In short: they wanted a platform that would support their cultural change. They went live with Jive in Q3 of 2009. They then already had 1500 users. At the end of 2009 they had 10000 users. Their key lessons: Strive for long-term objectives but work in phases and take the time needed Position it as an integrated b...

RichardHare , British American Tobacco is the next presenter. They have 60000 employees. Richard is a Knowledge, Communication and Collaboration Consultant. He starts out with the question who loves their intranet? And who’s users love their intranet? Not many hands go up. Complaints about their intranet: Search takes 20 seconds to return meaningless results Content out of date Difficult to navigate when based on hierarchy … but people still want sites. They connected the roll out of the content management tool to the roll out of the new corporate brand. This helped pull things together. (He showed several local intranets. Most looked the same.) Their intranet only has top navigation, no left-hand navigation. Activity updates in the middle, daily news on top. People-centric navigation. Evaluation of the set-up was done with senior management based card sorting and benchmarking. To define if people can find things and understand what the labels are called. Social media at British A...

Oops, missed the 1st minutes of Neil Morgan , Head of Global Intranet at WWF International (5000 employees). How did they get to their new collaboration platform? Surveyed users by asking questions and watching the way they worked. Based on the survey’s they came up with personas. They found that lots of work was very labor intensive. To address their ‘problems’ they turned to Google. People were already using Gmail, Google Docs, etc. They went for Google Apps: Calendars Docs (e.g. Forms), Spreadsheets Presentations Google Sites (best practices, wiki space, etc.) Neil stresses how really simple it was to set up Google Apps and how simple it is too use. He also shows how well the parts of Google Apps integrate. Search Docs or Search All from one box. Create a document, share it easily and chat about it in the sidebar. Etc. How do they link all these sites back into the intranet portal. They implemented a newsroom approach on the central intranet. They want the sites to think more in a n...

Mikaela Terhil of Wartisila Corporation is on the stage. They provide lifecycle power solutions. Wartsila recently allowed employees to access social networking platforms like Facebook from inside the company. They started by integrating the intranets into one intranet. Then they added social features to the intranet, workspaces and office communicator. Why social features? They wanted to help employees do their work, find the right employees, connect people together, bring expertise and different perspectives together, share knowledge, etc. In short: knowledge sharing and productivity. So they now have: People search > search over all profile information. Employees fill in profile info, blogposts etc are automatically related, you can also follow others Compass profile > this is personal blogs, which is planned but not implemented yet Personal site > collects and shows all your personal information on the intranet (not MySite, but MS profiles) Poll > to get a feel of what ...

Next up is Viviane Dupre of Bombardier. Bnet evolution will be done in a more formal and structured approach. It’s more than intranet; an enterprise 2.0 implementation. They have high level management buyin for the project. A heavily organized governance model. Current version of the Bnet employee portal is from 2004 with less than $100.000 investment. It replaced 100 plus intranets. They have 350 content managers. Minimal governance at the content level. Bnet has been identified as a business critical application. In May 2009 they did a survey. 5000 employees responded to the survey. 64% gave a negative rating of the home page. They also asked what employees actively used on the internet. Like Youtube, LinkedIn. 42% were contributors in 2009. This project was also used to improve employee engagement. By empowering employees, be recognized. Increased employee engagement should lead to increased customer engagement. They wrote up a mission for the Bnet. Stressed enabling and increasing...

Next up is Sean McNiven , SAP . Sean is head of the Social Web. Sean starts out with Web 0.0. Web 0.0 was and is the coffee machine. It’s still their running communication platform. This platform is now also happening on the web. The rules are practically the same, says Sean. So the guidelines are the same as well. Be honest, be respectful and add value, don’t pick fights, separate opinion from fact, be human, etc. A brief history of their employee network: 1995-1997 DMS and structure; 1998 SAPNet Communication, Team Collaboration and self service; 205 Corporate Portal based on Netweaver; 2007-200 Corporate Portal, Relaunch Enhanced UI and Personalization; 2010 SAP Employee Network, SAP Corporate Portal + integrated external tools and social media / Enterprise search. The governance changed considerably over the years. From open/decentral to closed/central in 2007. Now the governance is hybrid: open groups, governed communities, expiry of unused groups. SAP has many modules that integr...

Wow, that’s a whole mouthful! This is the first presentation at Employee Portal Evolution Masters 2010 in Berlin. I’ll be live-blogging through this conference. The subtitle of the conference is Strategic business approach for employee portal lifecycle management and integration of social media in rapidly changing digital environment’. Another mouth-ful! Mark Morrell , Intranet Manager of BT has the honors of opening this conference. The title of his talk is the title of this blogpost. BT’s intranet is about 16 years old. It started in 1994. It’s available to 140.000+ employees including 3rd parties. All information and applications are online. They can access it wherever they want. They use it for collaboration online too: blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, Twitter. Their intranet was also a push towards a more paperless office. They benchmark their intranet through the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. And they’re one of the best… Why did they start using social media? Social media is techno...