New intranet powers meetings and growth at Informationsteknik
One of Sweden's fastest-growing meetings and video technology providers, Informationsteknik, has built an Omnia-based intranet to strengthen the organization's cohesion and internal communication. The new solution empowers the users to stay informed, meet digitally and collaborate, as well as share knowledge and skills across office boundaries.
”Our new communication platform gives us significantly better support in everyday life with easier and faster access to information, knowledge, processes, collaborations, tools and internal expertise. By consolidating and keeping everything in one place, we can work more efficiently. The new intranet also enables us to connect and stitch together our rapidly growing organization better and get new offices on track faster”, says Andreas Lindbergh, CTO at Informationsteknik Scandinavia AB.
Rapid expansion requires a joint platform
Informationsteknik started in 1989 and has grown into a nationwide technology supplier for meetings and events, with offices from Umeå in the north of Sweden to Malmö in the south. The company is one of the major players in the industry and has accelerated its growth rate in recent years. In 2019, Informationsteknik had 50 employees in two offices. Three years later, in the fall of 2022, the company is twice as big with over 100 employees spread across five offices.
Until 2021, Informationsteknik had a relatively simple and self-developed intranet with just a few functions for the booking of equipment and other resources, inventory management, and product information. A large part of the internal communication was handled via email. Other internal information as well as processes, project-related knowledge, manuals, and more were scattered in numerous folders on the employees' computers, on-premises servers, and various SharePoint sites. To find certain information, users had to know exactly where to look. There was an indisputable need to create a company-wide communication platform and a modern intranet.
“Our company's rapid expansion generated completely new communication, collaboration, and information needs. We needed to create a common platform for all offices where employees can find everything they need to perform their tasks, manage projects, collaborate, and communicate with each other efficiently. A platform that keeps everyone updated on the latest and creates cohesion across office boundaries”, Andreas points out.
According to Andreas, Omnia was an easy choice for them as they had kept an eye on the solution for quite some time. The deciding factor, however, was Omnia's deep integration with SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Teams, Yammer, and Stream.
A clear plan enabled fast implementation
The implementation project started in June 2021 and the new intranet was launched three months later at the beginning of September.
”Once we had decided to build a new intranet, there was a rush to get it done. The implementation project started at the beginning of June and on September 9 it was to be launched at a company-wide kick-off. It was the first time that employees from all five offices would get together after the pandemic. Being able to show the new platform at the kick-off was therefore one of our main priorities”, Andreas underlines.
The intensive work took place during the hot summer months. Everyone on Andreas’ team had to roll up their sleeves and puzzle their vacation days based on the tight schedule. Their biggest challenge was, above all, the project's short time frame but also the structuring, cleaning, and creation of high-quality and correctly prioritized content.
”We would never have been able to get it done on time without the very clear and well-thought-out project plan that Precio Fishbone's project manager Martin Antonsson drew up for us. With this as a starting point, we could easily prioritize and narrow it down to what was most important to include in the first version. As a customer, you usually have limited experience in building intranets, which makes it difficult to estimate the time and effort required for building various parts. For example, we wanted to prioritize the creation of an information section we call Support, which contains instructions on how our tools and systems should be used”, Andreas explains.
Successive rollout leads to better results
The new intranet Inside quickly became popular with the employees who were used to working with modern cloud-based tools. For those who previously mostly worked with email and on-premises solutions, it takes a little longer to get into the new ways of working.
”Everyone appreciates the intranet’s greatly improved accessibility to information, knowledge, and tools, even though they adopt the solution a little differently depending on their previous IT experience. Not least, they like the ability to quickly and easily filter out documentation that is in our SharePoint environment via Omnia. The Employee Directory is also much appreciated and we can see that knowledge and competence are shared between the offices to a much greater extent than before”, Andreas emphasizes.
Andreas tells us that after the launch they have continuously built on the intranet and filled it with new functionality and content. For example, they have created an onboarding page with company policies, procedures, tools, and other organizational information to help new offices integrate faster and more efficiently. The Quality Management System has also been published in Omnia, but with a preliminary article structure as it will be redone with Omnia's visualization tool in a near future. This will allow users to click through to various processes and linked structured documents.
“It’s a big advantage to divide the rollout of the intranet into several releases, instead of building and launching everything in one go. An incremental rollout strategy allows you to get a first version up quickly and you get the chance to test and fine-tune both functions and content in order to create the optimal solution. As I see it, the intranet is a constantly ongoing development project”, Andreas concludes.
