Intranet Engagement Increases by 50%

Functional Area

Next Generation Social Intranet

Client

Client is an international retailing group based in the Netherlands, with strong local consumer brands in Europe and the United States. The company has over 3000 stores and 218,000 employees worldwide/ Their foundation is selling great food and supermarkets are their core business.

They also operate other formats and channels so that customers can shop whenever and wherever is most convenient for them. The client has embarked on a new strategy to build on their success and significantly grow the company.

Challenge

The client’s strategy to reshape retail is designed to enable them to take advantage of rapidly changing customer behavior and retail trends, while staying competitive and successful. However communicating that strategy to over 200,000 people was proving challenging. While executive leaders within the organization had a clear understanding of the strategy, the organisation’s existing communications channels were ineffective in sharing that strategy.

The firm needed to find a simple, effective mechanism for sharing corporate messages, policies and other operational information with over 50,000 of their knowledge workers and leaders throughout the world. The initiative was to increase the number of people creating, sharing and consuming corporate information.

Their existing intranet and content management platforms were inflexible, poorly used, centrally controlled and expensive to maintain.

Approach

The client engaged White Stratus to conceive and deploy a Google-centric collaboration platform.

White Stratus took a 2 phase approach:

In Phase 1 a traditional style intranet solution was built using Google Docs and Sites. The intranet gave users access to RSS feeds, shared calendars, blogs and wide variety of other collaboration tools. Custom gadgets to support document management and time-based publishing were also built by White Stratus to extend the native functionality of the Google Apps platform and meet end user needs.

In Phase 2, the firm wanted a social style capability built into the Intranet. G+ was considered as an option but eliminated on the basis of functional constraints. 3rd party social applications such as Yammer were considered, but instead, to maintain alignment with the google-centric IT strategy, the client decided on a Google App Engine based custom social intranet application. This application, designed to offer G+ style functionality, offered a social stream, commenting, people directory and to sync of ‘circles’ with Active Directory.

Results

From inception to full deployment, Phase 1 of the project was completed in less than 12 weeks and cost less than the annual maintenance fee of the system it replaced.

Phase 2, the Social Intranet Application tool less than 8 weeks to design, build and deliver, and was less than 10% of the cost of an alternative third party solution being considered.

Benefits

Since Go Live, the number of authors actively creating content rose ten fold and overall engagement with the site rose by more than 50%.