Lowe & Partners Worldwide is a global advertising agency that has over 80 agencies in 54 different countries.

To address many issues involving a large, dispersed employee population – and all of the naturally occurring cultural and communications barriers – Lowe invested in a state of the art intranet portal, Lowe Go.

A very attractive and simple home page The Lowe Go intranet also has a very simple and effective vision: “To create a virtual ‘desktop’ for Lowe users that gives them fast access to the information and people they need so as to add substantial business value.” This focus on value has garnered Lowe the best intranet of they year (2006) at the British Computer Society Information Management awards.

“Lowe’s business is about creativity, and brilliant work only happens when talent, ambition and focus come together in a collaborative culture.” says Drew Murdoch, Lowe Go Project Manager. “The rapid expansion of the group resulted in many agencies using different IT systems which did not communicate with other agencies or management. Lowe Go has delivered increased efficiency, interaction and collaboration and now everyone feels part of the Lowe network.”

Specifically the Lowe Go intranet has the following objectives:

• Reinforce brand identity
• To provide a virtual desktop for Lowe users, which provides fast access to collaborative tools, information, documents and people
• To develop an environment conducive to creative excellence and in support of innovation and growth
• To bring efficiency to labour intensive and costly business processes, such as the creation of video show reels
• To help solve key current technical issues, such as single sign on and need for standards based technology
• To share the burden of content creation and ownership and provide accountability throughout that process

Digital Asset Management

Lowe Go has a number of impressive assets including an impressive knowledge management repository called that features real-time user editing, over 92,000 media assets, competitor information, light-boxes, project areas, and real time editing for show-reels (video).

The old way of storing video was on magnetic tapes. These required dedicated tape desks to view and the tapes took up vast amounts of storage space. The use of a real time editing tool means that rather than asking creative services to manually create and edit a reel from a tape, burn to CD and post across the network, anyone can create show reels now using the portal. Not surprisingly this is the most used portions of the intranet.