IBF24 in Australia brings SharePoint stories and innovation inspiration
The Australian hosted segment of IBF24 lasted only two hours, but packed a major punch of SharePoint intranet tours. This segment also highlighted Deloitte Digital’s major investment in innovation, which inspired IBF attendees from every continent, and included an interview with collaboration expert Michael Sampson.
These two hours of intranet tours started off with a guided tour of Deloitte Digital’s innovation-focused intranet. After falling behind some other Deloitte businesses around innovation, Peter Williams, Chief Executive of Deloitte Digital, initiated a major effort to start exposing and supporting great ideas at Deloitte Digital.
Part of that effort included Deloitte’s Innovation Academy, a site full of video presentations and inspiring material. Deloitte also implemented a highly-structured ideation system which allows any employee to suggest a bright new idea. Colleagues can comment on ideas to help improve them and vote on good ideas. Through this collaborative idea generating system, the most popular ideas surface to the top of the pile. Deloitte provides seed funding to the best ideas to run pilots, giving those who came up with the ideas the chance to prove their viability. So far several successful ideas have made it to market, including a popular Business Continuity Management (BCM) application for smart phones called Bamboo.
After an in-depth look at Deloitte Digital’s innovation engines, the Australian segment of IBF 24 moved on to three SharePoint intranet tours in a row.
IBF24 attends first got an intimate glimpse of Parsons Brinckerhoff’s (PB) SharePoint 2007 intranet, guided by PB’s Cory Banks. Apparently it took PB three tries before they were able to implement a SharePoint intranet that really worked, but on the third time they nailed it! With the help of hired SharePoint Experts PB launched a very successful intranet, the tour of which received rave reviews from IBF24 viewers. The clean design and strong information architecture demonstrated some of the best of what SharePoint can do. PB also shared insights into their intranet governance approach, which involves defaulting to open access to all community and group pages unless explicitly requested otherwise.
Next we were treated to a tour of Metlink’s SharePoint 2010 intranet. Metlink is the Australian Rail Transport organization and the tour of their intranet was provided by Alice Urquhart, Metlink’s Internal Communications Coordinator. Metlink’s lovely intranet impressed IBF24 attendees from the start. Alice provided a key piece of advice that couldn’t have been more spot-on: Communications and IT need to work very closely together on any SharePoint implementation. A final tidbit of useful info about Metlink’s intranet: To capture web analytics on their intranet Metlink uses CardioLog, which provides much more robust and user-friendly data than the analytics tools built into SharePoint 2010.
The final intranet tour from Australia took IBF24 viewers through NPS’ freshly upgraded SharePoint 2010 intranet. The NPS intranet showed another example of what a well implemented SharePoint intranet is capable of. The NPS homepage included a rich array of information, as well as interactive and highly personalized features. A highlight of the NPS intranet tour: the extensive features built out to welcome and orient new employees.
To round out the Australia segment of IBF24 we heard from Michael Sampson, renowned SharePoint and collaboration expert and author of the book, User Adoption Strategies. Michael discussed the real-world challenges of helping teams collaborate more effectively and gave targeted insights for intranet managers.
During just two hours in the Australian center of gravity, we crammed in an amazing amount of fascinating intranet content with a strong focus on real world success with SharePoint, collaboration and innovation.
Categorised in: Digital workplace, DWG24, Intranets
