Social Intranet for Roland Berger

Using communication in social networks, and also using it for a new intranet, had been the plan for Roland Berger for some time. The existing static intranet site, based on OpenText Livelink, no longer met the modern demands of the very dynamic environment of strategy consulting.

After a pilot project in 2012, based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and NewsGator Social Sites, the decision was made to finalize the technology basis for the final implementation. Early on, the project team decided on the then new version of SharePoint 2013, and carefully compared the new social features to the already familiar ones from News-Gator Social Sites. The vast number of functionalities within NewsGator Social Sites clearly decided the race.

Thanks to a very agile methodology, the interdisciplinary team managed to provide a pilot within 3 months and to complete the entire relaunch of the intranet within 6 months. Accompanied by a very extensive change management process, with its own internal advertising campaign, the implementation of the new social intranet was a complete success.

Decisive for this success was a very clear focus on the goals of the new intranet right from the start. The use cases shown in the following figure were the main focus:

In terms of content, the intranet is divided into three large areas: news, communities and profile pages. The enormous importance of social collaboration can be seen in the design of the homepage.

The entire left-hand side is devoted to the so-called newsfeed, in which the employee receives personalised information. The right-hand side is dominated by the company news with a modern slider function.

“The excellent collaboration with Alight in our interdisciplinary team enabled us to implement the new intranet in a very short time, exceeding our high expectations in terms of quality.”

Florian Hoecherl
Technischer Projektleiter zur Einführung des neuen Intranets

The additionally developed function “Manage My Widgets” allows employees to customise the homepage according to their wishes within a defined framework. The intranet is spanned by a modern “mega menu” that directs the navigation to the topics that are important for the employee, without setting limits through the underlying SharePoint structures. This makes all information accessible to the employee with just one click.

The structuring was done more in terms of content and is supported by the very clear and outstandingly successful design. Different colours stand for certain areas of the intranet, for example orange is used to highlight personalised content.

“Our goal was to make the employees the focus on the intranet. Not only should their needs be best fulfilled – colleagues, contact partners, authors, experts, etc. were everything on the intranet. We succeeded very well with that.”

Felix Huck
Chief Knowledge Officer