Implementing a new Social Intranet in 10 weeks in 10 countries

Project information

Customer

Arcadis

Product

Debble Multilingual intranet

Partner

ETTU

IMPLEMENTING AN INTRANET FOR 6,000 USERS

Arcadis is the leading global Design and Consultancy firm for natural and built assets. In this case study we are talking to Kathi Wimmer, Head of Internal Communications, and Karin van der Lustgraaf, Business Analyst, about the implementation of the new Arcadis Intranet for Europe.

The challenge

FROM 11 DIFFERENT INTRANETS TO ONE EUROPEAN INTRANET

Arcadis has grown rapidly and also the need for a structured internal communication policy emerged. This resulted in eleven different intranets that were used across Europe. Not only was the look and feel different from one country to another, but also employees found it difficult to find the right information on all of these different platforms.

Kathi Wimmer: “For our employees, it was really hard to connect with each other and find the right information. Although we operated as one company, it was very difficult for someone in France to access information in Germany. From an internal communication perspective, it was hard to engage the team and communicate our brand and strategy. There was no possibility for virtual interaction; news was only published top-down. As an example, a news item had to be uploaded eleven times on all of these different intranets. This was time consuming as you can imagine, especially when an emergency message had to be communicated.”

“But also from an IT perspective, it was hard to work together,” Karin van der Lustgraaf adds. “We used different platforms and even different versions, for instance SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010. And since these were all standalone intranet platforms, it cost a lot of time and effort in terms of maintenance and support to keep these intranets up and running.”

Requirements

Microsoft Office 365

Karin van der Lustgraaf: “Arcadis has chosen the platform Microsoft Office 365. It provides us with a responsive platform, which can meet the users’ requirements. Moreover, there are partners that offer solutions within the Office 365 platform that match our needs. That is why one of the most important requirements for a new intranet supplier was that they would be able to offer us a standard product. We do not have the support capacity to do this all by ourselves. By choosing a standard product, we benefit from a proven solution without any custom work.”

The solution

Providing information on a country level

Kathi Wimmer: “By choosing Debble Workplace, we benefit from the advantages of a standard product. At first, we were afraid that an out-of-the-box solution would not be able to provide us with flexibility to customize the intranet to the structure of our organisation. Luckily, we didn’t need to worry about this. We are amazed by its customization flexibility in order to create the portal of our needs. That is why we named it ‘The Intranet’.”

Karin van der Lustgraaf: “We organised the intranet in such a way that we are able to provide information on country level, but also on a different language perspective. The technique used for this is called variations, which makes it possible to publish news and information in different languages. Very important for our international way of working!”

Future developments

Working together

Arcadis will send out surveys to asks opinions about the new intranet and see where the intranet can be improved or what information is missing. Kathi Wimmer: “We started this project in Europe, but we now see that other regions are looking at how we improved our internal com munication channels. The Middle East is the first region after Europe that implemented Debble Workplace as their new social intranet. Soon other regions will follow.”

“Debble offers us an out-of-the-box intranet solution in Office 365 that replaced our eleven-year-old intranets. ETTU helped us implementing the new intranet within 10 weeks and we were amazed by its customization flexibility in order to create the intranet of our needs,”

Kathi Wimmer, Head of Internal Communications, Arcadis Europe

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