Description

The biggest challenge with the corporate Intranet system for National Bank of Canada was to facilitate information retrieval while at the same time providing assistance for work processes of some 17,000 employees, thus creating value for both customers and the organization. The wide diversity of segments representing different types of activity was such that for every segment, there was a need for a different type of information.

The content architecture of the old version of the corporate Intranet simply had products and departments listed vertically. The approach was not task-oriented and therefore did not respond to employees’ real needs. Employees had to combine several computer tools (applications, platforms, etc.). The rather daunting task of standardizing the Web environment had become unavoidable and would include integration of several departmental and subsidiary Intranet sites.

Such factors as pace of work, how information would be used and the level of collaboration among and across multiple sectors needed to be taken into account and made increasingly part of the Intranet to help employees to do their jobs. If National Bank was to maintain its postion among the best banking establishments, it was becoming imperative for the bank to invest in employee excellence and preservation of corporate knowledge.

Evolution

OVERHAUL OF THE INTRANET SYSTEM—The solution is part of a vision of the employee portal that targets integration of information, communication, and collaborative and transactional aspects of the system. A principle of task-based assistance was applied, whereby employees’ information needs are determined according to the task at hand. All of the different Intranet sites were integrated and combined to offer a single log-in.

One of the guiding principles of the proposed solution is based on the concept of user profiles, which determine different pathways to information. The structure and organization of the new Intranet portal were therefore designed to take employees to where they need to go quickly based on who they are, what they do and what they need.

Employees are given profiles according to the employee groups to which they belong (standard profiles).These profiles are then used to get them to the right value-added information and to the most important content from the first pages of their session. Auto-segmenting will act as the primary navigational and organizational principle in regard to content for the initial phase. This will be the point of entry leading to targeted content determined by the groups to which the employee belongs. At a later phase, it will be possible to tailor content to individual employees’ needs.