Who

The client is one of Australia’s largest companies, and an ASX100 Top10.  The division is an Australia and New Zealand market leader for industrial and safety supplies.  The organisation comprises 11 businesses and a corporate office providing shared services, and employs around 2,000 staff in 140 branches.

Why

The client was looking for transformational change to promote collaboration across its geographically dispersed operations.  The existing intranet was generally poorly regarded, information sharing was largely via email and there were no effective tools to support collaboration across its geographically spread operations.

How

Unique World was engaged to review the organisation’s information management needs, including a full evaluation of the intranet. The engagement was in two parts.

In the first stage, Unique World conducted workshops and stakeholder interviews to develop the roadmap for a SharePoint rollout.  The roadmap takes into account not just technology capabilities, but also the client’s maturity level, culture, organisational structure, scale, geography and the specific needs of its employees.

The roadmap:

• Provides a framework and plan for implementation of information management capabilities that are aligned with the company’s strategic imperatives
• Ensures it can plan for the budget and resources to execute the roadmap and ensuing program of works effectively
• Identified quick wins within the first phase that will provide an early tangible return on investment and build confidence for subsequent phases

The second part of the engagement involved implementing a new intranet based on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Unique World worked with the client to design a SharePoint platform that would provide a robust base for the projects identified in the roadmap, including a best practice physical architecture and user-friendly, extendable information architecture.

Unique World then worked with the client’s technical team to implement the new intranet over a 6month period, to be brought into production in early 2012.

Now

Some of the benefits of the Information Management Strategy and SharePoint 2010 Intranet deployment include:

• Better mid-long range insight that reduces unknowns and enables advanced budget, resource and change management planning
• Reduced business interruption with fast-tracked, best-practice implementation
• Collaborative process that has increased user support and buy-in to the new intranet, and allowed the company’s IT division to skill-up
• Improved budget resource and change management planning
• Reduced business interruption from best-practice intranet implementation
• Collaboration contributing to higher user acceptance