The Situation
A major UK energy generator was looking to make a final choice around a collaboration platform to roll out country wide across their business. They had some limited exposure to Sharepoint 2003 and were impressed by its capabilities, but wanted to ensure that these capabilities would fit into a range of real world business scenarios before committing to a full implementation.
The client engaged WCI to assist them in a Proof of Concept (PoC) project around a number of requirements for a collaboration platform, driven by clearly identifies business needs.
Three current ‘real’ business issues were identified;
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Their legacy intranet was getting difficult to manage and the Content Management capability had been a hindrance for some time. It had a look and feel that was clumsy and totally different experience to their public Internet site. There were many other issues preventing the Communications team from achieving their goals including speed and distribution of key messages and business news, lack of effective search, lack of effectively organised content centrally and/or locally controlled content and no method of clearly and graphically displaying important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the business. In summary the Communications team were unable to operate in either a timely or functional manner due to the short comings of the current environment.
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Within their Engineering function, they had many teams country wide that worked on similar types of projects and had the same problems and issues on a day to day basis, but due to the fact that they worked within hierarchically different management structures, they had been working in isolation and not sharing experiences, and many of the more senior members were due to retire in the next few years with potentially catastrophic results for the business, given that very little of their experience was captured or consolidated anywhere. In addition, their business processes were highly manual.
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The IT department had a structured process that must be followed for the documentation and approval paths for any new technical projects. The process is key to maintaining a well structured and secure environment, which is essential for the businesses day to day operation. Management of the process and its workflow was manual with a summary spreadsheet used to store current project information and status. However, the manual nature of this central summary and control point causes delays and misplacement of projects and related documents within the process workflow, creating overall project delays and some level of security risk to their environment as a result.
The Solution
MOSS 2007 was selected as the tool to use for the PoC projects in order to utilise the full capabilities available in the latest release.
WCI worked with the client to gather the detailed requirements from the end users and then engaged in designing and developing the 3 pilots to meet the user needs.
Although the aim of the project was to build PoC solutions, WCI designed and built each solution in a way could be rolled out (or extended) for live use, if required at a later date, without the need for major rework of the solutions.
Intranet – a portal to demonstrate a new intranet with the same ‘look and feel’ as their current Internet site. This included a wide range of features and functionality including;
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Easy to use content management with defined user rolls, approval paths and version control/history.
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High visibility of key messages with instant creation and centrally controlled distribution.
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Fully functional search of both internal and external sources
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Replacement of Line of Business Applications with MOSS web parts
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Surfacing of data from existing Line of Business Applications with the MOSS
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Business Data Catalogue
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Document management and tagging for search
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Portal topology to match business structure
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Example collaboration sites to meet various business solutions
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Use of ‘MySite’ with Outlook integration to drive day to day working practices
Knowledge Capture – a pilot to develop Community Sites for different clusters of Engineers to increase the flow of knowledge amongst engineers working on different sites and projects utilising the full range of collaboration techniques.
Workflow – dedicated project collaboration sites with automation of the approvals process around important documents using the workflow capability within SharePoint 2007. Summary project status site with real time roll up of current status and activities/tasks around all projects.
Benefits
The new portal has been enthusiastically received by both field Engineers and by the central IT and Corporate Communication teams. The project delivered over and above the clients expectations, proving how rapidly a wide range of powerful functionality can be built within MOSS.
The client is now embarking upon a programme to fully deploy the technology across their business.
For more information on this case study please contact: janet.waplington@wcigroup.com