Social Intranet for IE Singapore (Winner-1st place, DWG 2012)

Awards

Winner (1st place) Digital Workplace Group (DWG) My Beautiful Intranet (Goes Social) 2012: International Enterprise Singapore (Social) Intranet by Digital Workplace Group (DWG). Formerly Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF)

URL: http://www.digitalworkplacegroup.com/2013/01/08/my-beautiful-intranet-2013-winner/

The Award Winning IEX
Being on top of the latest information is important as IE Singapore helps companies identify global opportunities. In April 2012, the revamped IEX was launched, an intranet platform that made the most of their collective knowledge and resources found across their global network of 37 offices and more than 500 staff.

“It was a very close contest, but in the end International Enterprise Singapore’s intranet won us over because it displayed the most social interaction. The judges decided that ‘beauty’ is not just about what it looks like, but in how it works, allowing employees to share knowledge directly from the homepage.”-  Louise Kennedy, Intranet Benchmarking Forum Judge.

IEX pulls and connects information, making it convenient and efficient for IE staff globally to find what they need, right at their fingertips, within a nanosecond. Vital information is shared daily, across a broad spectrum of markets, industries and capabilities. Whether it’s a blog post, market or industry report, events, or new government policies, staff can post and read what’s happening all around the world instantly.

At the heart of IEX is its social interactivity, which was built after understanding the organization’s sharing culture and other areas over a three month user research period.

Role: Lead UX consultant

UX phases: User research, synthesis, information architecture, interaction design, usability testing, adoption strategy

Activities:

  • SOW authoring
  • Client interaction and presentations. Weekly, fortnightly and monthly meetings besides demos.
  • Site audit, working with knowledge management team on knowledge map, expert review, research report on current intranet state
  • Staff interviews
  • Associated systems review
  • Metadata definition, facets definition, controlled vocabulary definition, site map
  • Prototyping, social network design, search and facets design
  • Prototype testing
  • Offline supporting processes definition
  • Adoption strategy

The story

IE Singapore wanted a social intranet so it would be a business enabler in terms of quick access of relevant information and connections between staff. It was to use sharepoint.

IE Singapore is a government agency enabling Singaporean businesses to do business abroad and to a lesser extent, help foreign companies set shop in Singapore. They concentrate on industries and markets across the globe for this.

I conducted user research to come up with a design document which would be used to come out create the technical document.

I conducted user research in the form of staff interviews with over 22 departments to understand the business environment- the different departments, how information was created by each, who they disseminated it to, whose information did they need and how it was shared amongst others. Another important aspect I covered was the agency’s culture and attitude towards sharing information. This is crucial because if you want a social intranet where staff share information, you need to understand the drivers and barriers to it.

This led to the discovery that it was possible to take all the business information and classify them in matrix style across three facets- business, sector and document type. This vastly simplified the process to access business information.

Once the research phase was complete in two months, research findings were presented after which I worked on the design document which now had the interface to shape user behaviour and encourage them to share. This interaction design phase took another month.

The result was the transformation of a silo based intranet to a truly collaborative intranet that allowed real time sharing of business information among officers across the world which was not possible before.

The multiple department knowledge libraries (Z drives) were replaced by a single efficient access knowledge library for business information that allowed officers to access documents through across markets, industries or sectors and document types.

Document tagging was made easy through a simple one-step drag and drop process with minimal tagging using metadata information on the officers’ assigned sector and business.

The end result was an intranet that encouraged sharing at all steps of the way staff interacted with it, through user interface, through social appreciation, appraisal review and a process change so bosses took it as a requirement for their staff to share information rather than looking at it as to them wasting time.

Are you looking for a passionate, results-oriented and User Experience Architect to help you design services your customers will love?

Feel free to get in touch and let me take you through my portfolio and what I can offer over a cup of coffee.