Problem
After growing quickly through the acquisition of several other credit unions, internal information at Servus Credit Union was spread across four intranets with overlapping and out-dated content, and a frustrating employee experience. Since there was no integrated employee profile system, employees had difficulties locating and contacting colleagues with the right skills in other branches or locations.
Servus needed an integrated Intranet, but it also knew the challenges it would face as it moved to SharePoint 2010 and tried to migrate content from its legacy Intranets to a new, consistent platform.
Solution
Three nForm staff worked with Servus over four months during the summer of 2011 to create a unified user experience and design for the new Intranet. The project involved inventorying nearly 16,000 pages of content across four Intranets and planning their integration into a single Intranet, as well as creating detailed wireframes, mock-ups, IA and metadata schema. The intranet was built using SharePoint 2010 and leveraged Microsoft’s FAST Search.
We designed the core information architecture “engine”—the metadata system that connects policies, procedures, banking systems, branch locations and other business details so that staff can find content quickly and easily.
Servus Credit Union’s new employee portal – the Village – provides a single source of information for the organization’s 2,300 employees. Employees can find information and experts throughout the organization much more efficiently because the site content is organized to support employees in member service functions. Employees can filter content by topic, banking system, and region to ensure that the information is applicable to a specific member, all powered by the metadata system. Employee profiles are also tagged with relevant metadata, enabling employees to easily locate nearby colleagues with knowledge relevant to a specific need. The Village won the award for Canada’s Best Intranet at the 2012 SharePoint Summit.