Intranet Creates a Worldwide Community
The International Training and Education Center on HIV (I-TECH), based in the University of Washington’s Department of Global Health, employs over 600 staff in a network of offices and projects across 25 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. They work in partnership with local ministries of health, universities, non-governmental organizations, and medical facilities to support the development of a skilled health workforce and well-organized national health delivery systems.
With so many employees scattered across the world, maintaining connections and sharing resources became a daunting task. NPower's web consulting team helped to conquer this challenge by implementing a multi-faceted, interesting, and easy-to-use intranet site for staff.
“The intranet site NPower developed solves the problems we were experiencing with version control for key organizational documents, and with difficulty connecting across physical distances.”
- Tom Furtwangler, Director of Communications and Information Technology
The Challenge
- I-TECH wanted to create an organizational culture, something that is particularly challenging when staff are spread across the world.
- They also needed a central location where all employees could go to find answers to questions related to organizational policies and procedures.
- I-TECH knew an intranet site was needed, but a previous attempt to establish one was not readily accepted by staff.
The Solution
- I-TECH had a clear vision for the purpose of the site and NPower was able to engage in productive discussions about what a better intranet site would look like.
- The NPower team provided options that included content to attract users - like posts about what’s happening in various I-TECH projects, photos from the field, a staff blog – as well as essential information for people to do their jobs - policies, guidance, and support documents.
- A new system for organizing information was established along with a powerful search function, making it much simpler and faster to locate documents.
The Impact
- Staff usage is steadily increasing and it has begun to contribute to a sense of connection within the organization.
“At one point there was a whole series of pictures of camels, taken in different countries, getting posted by staff to the blog. That kind of thing contributes to a sense of connection-it's exactly what we’re looking for.”
-Tom Furtwangler
- The site has also cut down on the number of calls to the finance department about procedures and has improved reliability for the organization-wide policy manual.
- Following the success of the intranet site, I-TECH re-engaged with NPower to revamp their public website, choosing to building upon the same technology that had been successfully deployed for the intranet site.
