WINNIPEG, Manitoba-The social media phenomenon has spawned the need for organizations to employ social intranet solutions, a trend that is growing in the financial services industry.
"After we conducted an extensive needs analysis, we scoured the marketplace to create a list of providers we believed could meet our needs," said Assiniboine Credit Union's Marketing and Communication Manager, Duane Nicol. "From the very beginning we had a special philosophy about this project: This is not an information technology project that impacts our people, it's a people project that impacts our IT."
The credit union has 108,000 members, 543 employees, 25 branches and $3.3 billion in assets. The discovery-to-launch process took nine months. "After we conducted an extensive needs analysis, we scoured the marketplace to create a list of providers we believed could meet our needs," said Nicol. "We identified eight and asked them to submit a proposal. From those eight proposals we short listed four companies, and had them present to an advisory committee we established."
While there are many intranet providers, such as the big brand names like IBM, Nicol explained the discovery process brought the credit union to the Vancouver-based ThoughtFarmer. The company has 125 clients, 17 of which are financial institutions, ranging from 50 to 6,000 users. On that list is the Albany, N.Y.-based SEFCU, formerly known as State Employees FCU, which has some 810 employees.
"YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are all less than 10 years old. As people have grown increasingly comfortable with social media at home, their expectations of how workplace communication and collaboration should work have changed," said ThoughtFarmer's co-founder and vice president of sales and marketing, Chris McGrath, who added that company sales have increased by 92% between 2011 and 2012. "The static, one-way, traditional intranet is no longer good enough. Employees want to be heard, and forward-thinking employers want to hear them. So this is driving a huge increase in the appetite for social intranets."
Managing the Intranet Data Load
Organizations such as Assiniboine Credit Union have found that employees are increasingly using social enterprise tools such as blogs, wikis and activity feeds. The anecdotal evidence is further supported by a 2012 Prescient Digital social intranet study that found 61% of companies have adopted at least one social feature. But one drawback to social intranets is managing or archiving data, which often leads to excessive storage. To this end, McGrath said that approximately 80% of user-generated content is never deleted.
"The biggest improvement is the change in approach our company has taken to information exchange. In the past content-owners would prepare content, find the place they believe it belonged and have IT post it to our intranet. All of the responsibility to find and understand the information was placed on the end-user," said Nicol, adding that its intranet is named Mosaic. "We've reversed that. Now, it's the content-owner's responsibility to prepare information in a way that their intended audience will understand and then place it in a location that they can easily find it."
With 25 branches and 543 employees, training was a concern Assiniboine CU addressed during the beta stage. "We involved an expanded group of people we had identified as intranet champions as a way to test the software. So as we built the site, we were constantly testing its functionality," said Nicol. "Every employee literally was given an opportunity to help build their new intranet. There were really no hiccups with the crowd sourcing software, it performed as it should."
'The Biggest Challenge'
McGrath believes that more care has to be taken with financial institution intranets, a process that impacts contractual agreements and roll out.
"The biggest challenge with Assiniboine CU was the back-and-forth lawyering while finalizing the contract," he said. Financial services firms obviously need to take precautions that many other firms don't, and hosting in the cloud introduces more complexities."
To date, he noted that the credit union has been the most heavily used ThoughtFarmer installation of any of its mid-sized clients (i.e., 200 to 1,000 users).
"In our business you always have security concerns. Because our site is hosted externally and because employees will be able to log in from home or on their mobile devices, we spent a lot of time thinking through security issues," said Nicol. "We worked with our IT team to ensure that the hosting provider meet all of the standards we have set for third-party applications hosted offsite. We require strong password standards; at least one uppercase, a lowercase and a numeral. Passwords must be changed every 90 days."
To further ensure security, Assiniboine CU member data is not stored directly on Mosaic; however, it can be stored on an internal server and accessible through Mosaic by link or iframe.
"In this way only people who are connected to our internal network or via VPN connection can gain access to the data," said Nicol. "We've taken every precaution we can to keep our member and corporate information protected."
Integrating the Intranet
When approaching adopting an intranet solution, all organizations have to decide whether to install software on internal servers or take it to the cloud, the latter was determined to be the best fit for Assiniboine CU.
"The installation of the software on to the server was managed by the folks at ThoughtFarmer. We signed the contract and they essentially dropped the keys in our hand and said let's take it for a spin. We have a few self-developed applications that we use in our business. Those are hosted on our internal servers and protected from external access," said Nicol. "We simply use an iframe to pull the user interface through our site, giving the impression that the application has been integrated into the site."
Nicol explained that nearly 78% of Assiniboine CU's staff uses the intranet at least once per hour. On average, all employees login in the morning, check various feeds such as member service, employee communications or news about the teams and groups to which they've been assigned. They keep the site open in a browser tab and refer back to it throughout the day.
Employee Questions Get Answers
"Employees regularly comment on new page items to ask questions if they don't understand. The content-owner responds and because the question and response is recorded on the page, people who may have the same question can immediately receive clarification," said Nicol. "Because we have 25 branches, two of which are in northern Manitoba, it can be hard to bring people together for project meetings. With Mosaic's team space, our employees can work together remotely, sharing documents and having online conversations without using cumbersome e-mail exchanges. The conversation is recorded so it can be referred to conveniently and shared with others easily."
To be clear, an intranet solution is a considerable undertaking and determining the return on investment can be tricky.
"We didn't have a lot of analytics from our old site so we really didn't have much of a benchmark. Early in the project we conducted an all employee survey asking our employees about the effectiveness of our old site: how easy it was to use, how confident they were in the information accuracy, and the like," said Nicol. "In March we will be conducting the same survey for our new site and will compare the results."
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