Never build or redesign an intranet without understanding best practices. Understanding what your competition does is even better.
A good source of case studies and best practices is the Web itself from sites like this. Conferences can also be good; so too are intranet consultants (but they’re a little more expensive). An even better place for leading and in-depth case studies is the Intranet Insider’s World Tour webinar series.
Previous webinars on the Insider’s look at leading intranets include IBM, Sodexho and most recently General Motors. Next webinar is HP.
HP’s intranet portal, hpNOW, was launched in 1997, serving primarily as an archive for Employee Communication’s electronic newsletter and for selected articles from the company’s print publication. Over time, online communications became more and more critical to communications at HP, eventually reducing the electronic newsletter to a push reminder to visit the site and serving as the replacement of the worldwide employee print publication, when it was discontinued in 2001.
Since its launch, hpNOW has been on a mission to become a first-class news service and the preferred site of HP employees around the world. To reach this goal, the Employee Communications team has focused on three things: developing quality content, using new technologies and working within a huge and complex system.
This is a good case study webinar for building a business case to redesign your own intranet (see Leading an intranet redesign). During this webinar you’ll learn:
- History/evolution of hpNOW — and what happened to print vehicles at HP along the way
- The art and science of getting good content (real consumer product reviews, monthly photo contest, employee letters, products on a page, preserving HP’s Legacy (garage restoration project)
- Editorial process, finding stories: balancing the “need to know” with the “want to know” (it’s never perfect)
- RSS for internal and external news: taking a grassroots approach, the challenges of working with IT
- Chat forums and blogs: They are all over the intranet, but not on hpNOW (reasons, challenges, plans with social media at HP)
- Use of video and webcasts
- Experiences of moving from static intranet to portal — consolidation of sites, integration of Compaq, staffing, homepage design and personalization
- Measurement and marketing tools: tracking pages, rate this feature, surveys, quizzes (using database to manage)
- Technology: proactively looking for new ways to communicate using technology; example: the poor man’s video (Flash animation)
- Ask HP: HP’s unique intranet feature that allows employees to ask any question “anonymously” and get an answer from a qualified person
- Customers inside: How internal communications worked with customer Disney, PR and advertising to create the biggest internal sweepstakes ever — entire campaign on hpNOW
- How we are organized: being in the Marketing organization and reporting into HR; the two schools of thought
- Other features: Peoplefinder, alert banner, role-based sites, such as Managers Central Governance, staffing, next evolutions
Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media
