Province of Antwerp launches groundbreaking intranet
Antwerp, 21 September 2010 – The intranet of the Province of Antwerp, which had been in operation for six years and was based on an equally old vision of online internal communication, was in urgent need of a thorough overhaul. The Communications and IT Department of the province of Antwerp therefore decided to join forces with Amplexor and Internet Architects in order to carry out this groundbreaking project.
“It is safe to say that our old intranet was quite prehistoric compared with current standards of technology,” said Anja Neels, the person in charge of communications at the Province of Antwerp. “It was anything but user-friendly. The navigation was not transparent, which made it difficult for users to find the information they required. What’s more, the people supplying information were unable to put anything online themselves, since everything was centralised and had to be arranged through the Communications Department.”
The new intranet proved to be quite a challenge for the province of Antwerp, not least because the organisation has around 2000 members of staff who work in some 70 departments at 40 locations. As Anja Neels confirmed, “There is a huge amount of diversity within our organisation. Each department has its own specific information requirements, and on top of that we needed to take account of all our locations and all members of staff at every level, from workers in the parks department to middle management and the top level of management.”
During the first phase of the project, the most important task for the Province of Antwerp was to identify information requirements, determine how information should be presented and establish how an intranet could help staff carry out their duties. The users were able to provide the answers themselves. Following five months of study and 15 brainstorming sessions with staff from the various departments, the must-haves and the nice-to-haves were formulated. “We wanted to take the needs of our organisation as the starting point for this project, which is why we invested so much time and effort in obtaining information from our staff. This turned out to be an extremely informative exercise that taught us a great deal about information requirements as well as the navigation structure,” Anja Neels said.
The homepage of the new communication portal looks very appealing. At the top of the page a photo carrousel introduces some of the co-workers. In addition to a “Don't miss” article and a press review, there is also a section for departmental notices as well as announcements of a more general nature. The navigation bar at the top contains headings such as ‘Personeel’ ('Staff'), ‘Werkprocessen’ ('Working Procedures') and ‘Bestuur en Organisatie’ ('Administration and Organisation'). These headings provide a clear point of reference and guide staff towards the information they seek. There is also a separate section, ‘Plezant’, for content that is not strictly work-related. This section includes information on people celebrating birthdays or work anniversaries, a list of staff discounts, details of activities organised by the staff association etc.
“We wanted to make the intranet as interactive as possible and very easy to use so that everyone would become involved,” Anja Neels explained. “We accomplished this in a number of ways. Departmental notices can be posted and respond to, which is effectively a form of microblogging, staff can place wanted ads, they can set up forums, everyone can perform a number of actions on each page, such as reporting corrections, and all staff can upload a photo of themselves to their own personal profile page, plus much more besides. It has also become a great deal easier to search for information on members of staff thanks to the "Who's Who" application, an online directory of the province’s workforce. In addition, there is now one person at each department who is responsible for supplying information and ensuring it is kept up to date. In this way, we have not only empowered the individual departments, we are also able to keep lines of communication short for supplying information.”
The intranet project of the province of Antwerp was carried out in the course of a two-year partnership between the Communication and IT Department, Amplexor, the content management specialist, and Internet Architects, the strategic online consultancy.