imjon.com

thoughts, ideas, projects and musings

HR portal launches




An Intranet
Originally uploaded by juque

Yesterday was another auspicious day for our work intranet as at 06:00 EDT, we launched the new HR portal section bringing self-service tools to our employees.

Culturally, it’s a major change. We’ve shifted from a traditional HR model (providing local HR experts aligned to functional teams) to a centralised support model with aligned self-service intranet facilities.

The intranet aspect of this launch has been an major undertaking. It has seen us switch from a simple simple SharePoint iteration to a multi-variation model to manage the various language options across our geographies (US English, US Spanish, Canadian French, Canadian English, UK English, French, Belgian French, Belgian Dutch and Dutch).

A few facts to share:

  • Switch from 1 to 9 SharePoint variations
  • New menus to accommodate HR content
  • 2000+ pages of multi-lingual content
  • 12 Integrated SAP HR transactions
  • New “MyLinks” section to enable web bookmarking
  • Integrated employee benefits functions
  • Integrated job search functions
  • New “workbench” page
  • Enhanced employee profile page

This new launch is a major piece of work and a huge step change for our intranet which, up until now, has largely been a communication and collaboration vehicle. As good as that content was, our employees had no “compulsion to visit”, meaning the site was mostly for browsing rather than for action.

Bringing transactions to the portal adds that employee “compulsion to visit” which will have knock on value for the news articles and executive communications. In the long run, I hope that our employees will that the ease of information access and flexibility of use will outweigh the negatives of not having an HR expert immediately to hand — but only time will tell.

Tomorrow I’ll share some of the initial feedback :)

3 Comments »

  Dorje McKinnon wrote @ April 30th, 2009 at 10:28 pm

J,

Thanks for sharing this insight that it there are large organisations, that are prepared to improve the Staff experience by bringing complexity into the intranet.

Looking forward to more on this project.

DorjeM

  Sam Marshall wrote @ January 28th, 2011 at 9:49 am

I was intrigued by the mention of “•12 Integrated SAP HR transactions”. Are these delievered through SharePoint? Do they look like part of the itnranet to the user or do they look like SAP?

If they look like SharePoint, I’d love to hear the business case around the extra effort involved in making this happen. Intuitively it makes sense, but so often I hear that it is hard to get funding to do this.

  Jonathan wrote @ January 28th, 2011 at 10:06 am

Hi Sam

In common with many SAP:SharePoint projects, we wrestled with the degree of integration. Achieving value for money here is critical. Whilst everyone would have loved a seamless UX, to do that and with SAP is expensive, but not impossible. We opted for an iframe approach but did engineer a solution that meant the user did not have to log on to the application. It was the right balance at the time, although I confess I would have loved to surface it fully.

Your comment

HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

website stats