Content is still ‘king’ on the intranet. Whether it’s a static page, a form or data in a hidden application, employees want content. But they demand good content.
How do employees know if the content is good? SimCorp, a highly specialized software maker for investment and treasury management, is using an innovative system on their intranet that rates the quality of each content page.
Built on Microsoft SharePoint, each ‘portal’ under the main SimCorp intranet portal features a portal quality score that rates the relevancy (how up-to-date) of each page or document. For instance, if a portal contains 100 documents and 97 of them are up-to-date, then the portal has a quality score of 97%. The rating scores is accompanied by a very happy smiley face icon for ratings higher than 90%, and an angry little icon for a score of 60% or less. The emotive face icons and scores reflect at a glance the content quality.
“The minimum quality score is 80%, and if a score falls below 70%, the smiley face disappears,” says Gale Langseth, SimCorp’s intranet manager. “Then I (am notified) as the SimLink Manager, and can give them the help that they need to get things back to where they should be again.”
To determine the score, each document is marked with a status: draft, finished, historical, or review. The system reminds the document's creator after a certain amount of time (3 months for a draft, 6 months for a finished document, and never for a historical document) to review and republish the document to ensure relevancy. If for example a portal has 100 documents, and 10 have yet to be reviewed, then the portal is given a score of 90%.
“Each document can be looked at by a user to find out when it was last updated, and the creator is listed in case anyone has questions,” adds Langseth. “This is the most valuable application on the intranet because of how we do things here at SimCorp. We want the content to be easily findable and easily shared, but we also need to ensure that it is of high quality so that it is reliable.”
The system is so successful that SimCorp’s average content quality score is 90% across all the portals. In fact, the content rating system has helped fuel a real intranet success story for such a small firm: SimLink won this year’s IntranetPrisen 2007, the best intranet of the year, at this winter’s annual IntraTeam Event conference on intranets.
SimCorp’s intranet success and value to the organization is further underscored by the fact that, on an average day, 90% of SimCorp’s employees will use the intranet.
Founded in 1971 and headquartered in
SimCorp’s intranet, SimLink, is the company’s most important information and communication tool. It is acknowledged by employees as the optimal tool to easily locate and share high-quality information in their daily work. SimLink promotes three overarching principles for employees:
- We must provide a single focal point of entry to an integrated platform on which each employee can easily access business relevant information and the relevant tools to perform their work efficiently
- We must be able to ensure that the content quality is high and that all available information is regularly updated
- We must be able to easily find and register relevant knowledge
“SimLink is more than an intranet, it is also our content management system,” says Langseth. “Everything except development code is saved on SimLink. We are a knowledge-based organization, so we need to preserve this knowledge. Because everyone is saving documents on the intranet, we are not just a few people broadcasting information at everyone else, but participating in a collaborative project with 800 content providers.”
SimLink features 250 portals in all. Though this may appear high for a company of 800 employees it is easily achieved thanks to SharePoint, which allows security access to files (on the portal level instead of on the document itself), which has resulted in groups creating portals to limit access to certain information by different groups.
SimLink also features the element of very elementary role-based personalization. For example, there is not one home page, but rather each line of business uses a separate home page, so there are six 'homepages’ in all. To be considered a homepage, each must contain requisite elements including announcements (news), global navigation, the search interface, and the employee search interface.
SimLink's most used application is the employee search, which provides information such as phone number, email address, location, department, manager, and even private information such as home address and birthday. Each employee has their own My Site page (standard with SharePoint) that also displays their photo along with names (as active links) of members of their department.
SimLink also provides a competence database where employees can enter their training, previous employment, experience, other skills and background information. The competence database can be searched by other employees who need to find someone with a particular competence.
The intranet team comprises of an Intranet manager, four Knowledge Managers (one for each line of business), and a Content Manager for each portal. The Knowledge Managers serve to organize the Content Managers, address their concerns, give them assistance in building and maintaining their portals, and advise them how to provide the best portal possible for their audience, whether that be a department, group, or the entire company. Each Content Manager is pictured on their portal (so everyone knows who to go to with questions) and is responsible for making sure that the documents saved on their portal are kept up to date by their creators.
The SimLink Manager, Gale Langseth, falls under Corporate Communications. A SimLink Strategy Group oversees all of the high-level operations of the intranet and is the group that the SimLink Manager regularly convenes to determine the direction of the intranet (e.g. upcoming business needs, etc).
