COLUMBUS, Ohio-It's Facebook, Wikipedia and workflow all wrapped up in one Intranet portal at CME FCU here-and it's giving each employee a dashboard with real-time access to critical data.
Think of it as "Portal 2.0," where a manager logs-in to a personal start-page that works a lot like Facebook; there's the manager's headshot, profile and internal communities. The manager clicks to see yesterday's deposits and loan numbers and rate changes, all graphically illustrated. The figures have been pulled automatically from the core system onto the start page via RSS feed subscriptions first thing in the morning.
"We get all the information we need from a single pane of glass, so we can see how we're performing on any given day as an organization," said Joe Toth, VP-IT at the $168-million credit union. "We're now able to consolidate all our day-to-day or month-to month financial reporting from the core system automatically to one location. Previously, we passed around spreadsheets or pulled some reports out of the core and somehow cobbled them all together. We had no central repository because we wouldn't have been able to update one fast enough."
The year-old portal runs on Microsoft SharePoint to create, manage and store content. The content can be displayed on wikis, blogs, documents, forms and personal profiles. SharePoint also allows employees to collaborate and place content in workflows; build new information sites; and search.
NewsGator's Social Sites sits on top of SharePoint and enhances the "social computing" element, in part by allowing employees to tag content based on topics, or connect to internal experts or business communities, according to Laura Farrelly, director of marketing at Denver-based NewsGator Technologies.
Perhaps most importantly, Social Sites allows employees to access all content by subscribing to RSS feeds instead of email. That makes it easy for employees to be notified of updates in SharePoint. "As an organization, we were already saturated with email as a notification tool. RSS doesn't overwhelm employees like email does," said Toth.
With another mouse click, the manager can reveal recent CU documents, delivered by subscription. A pop-up alerts the manager that a new document has just arrived: the manager takes action on the document and then returns it to the portal workflow, where it's instantly routed to the next link in the chain.
"Like most credit unions, we're branched out with a distributed workforce, so being able to use workflow to drive our forms really makes a big difference," Toth explained. Within six months, all of the CU's forms will be stored to the portal and assigned to workflow processes.
"For example, an employee working at a different location can route a time-off request form to the line manager, who can approve it and route it to the HR manager," he said. "Everyone gets an electronic copy of the request, and a copy is stored in a central document library."
Human resources can subscribe to the feed for the time-off request library and view all requests at once, by day or by month-instead of keeping track of them the old-fashioned way, one-by-one on a stagnant Intranet, by courier or via email, said Toth.
In fact, all 70 employees at CME can subscribe to any number of live information feeds that push the latest internal headlines to the employee's start page. Feeds link by permission to core data such as Suspicious Activity Reports, Currency Transaction Reports and OFAC hits, or to any number of internal sites, such as an enterprise training site that contains updated guidance on Red Flag rules. Other sites feature step-by-step operational procedures and Q&A for common business problems, which are updated and displayed Wikipedia-style.
"Department heads can update content and then walk away from it," said Toth. "And anyone with permissions can add a note or some completely new content." The feeds automatically route the updated information to subscribers so the department head doesn't have to alert everyone via email, he said.
The RSS-subscription approach to getting content saves employees from manually gathering and assembling information, which used to take about 30 minutes per day per employee, said Toth.
CME will cut its printing and toner budget by nearly two-thirds next year, just because employees are able to view content from their start pages. They no longer have to drill down into disparate systems to find and print out reports and other documents, said Toth. "That's a pretty easy case for ROI."
MORE@CUJOURNAL.COM
Read more about intranet portals at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
Portal Tools Bring 'Common Bond' Back In Style
How Kitsap CU Uses Intranet System To Get All Employees
NuUnion CU Saves $50K
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