Bank of American Fork says it expects to improve internal communications and boost employee productivity when it switches to an upgraded intranet Nov. 5.
"This intranet solution will allow the different functions of the bank to more readily update their information," said Bruce Miller, a vice president and the chief information officer of the unit of the $867 million-asset People's Utah Bancorp of American Fork. "Any department in the bank can upload to the portal any documents that they determine are important, not only for their department, but to the organization," he said. "It's not going through a bottleneck in the IT department."
The bank looked at general purpose portal technology, he said, but "we wanted something that was more industry focused."
It chose Passageways Corporate Portal Framework software from Passageways LLC because the West Lafayette, Ind., vendor specializes in applications for the financial industry and offers specialized modules for workflow management and tasks such as employee reimbursements, Mr. Miller said. "And it gave us the ability to develop our own solutions."
The bank has been working with Passageways to transfer a learning management system the bank developed in-house that houses online training programs, documents employee participation, and manages transcripts, he said. "They will have the rights to resell that if they choose."
The new intranet will replace one the bank cobbled together in-house over time, but the old one involved multiple programming languages and was not well integrated, Mr. Miller said. "We felt Passageways helps us to take the next step in bridging the communications gap in our organization."
