Intranet portal case study: Nordea

http://intranetblog.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2007/4/10/2871702.html

 

Intranet portal case study: Nordea

by Toby Ward on Tue 10 Apr 2007 11:51 PM PDT  |  Permanent Link  |  Cosmos

Nordea is one of the largest banks in Northern Europe with 10 million customers (of which 4.6 million are also e-customers), 1,100 bank branches and 29,000 employees. Essentially, Nordea is the complex integration of four different banks – four different cultures in four principal countries with four different and distinct languages.

 

Back in 2000, the intranet was every group for themselves. In 2002, Nordea implemented a common design across the enterprise intranet. By 2005, Nordea had a single source portal for all employees. Today the intranet features:

 

• 150,000 pages
• 600 individual publishers
• content in 6 languages (English, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish-Finnish)

 

Nordea Intranet Portal home page featuring news and subscriptions

organized by type, country, organization and business unit.

 

The Nordea portal is a success. 70-80% of the employees visit the portal every day. Not surprisingly, the most frequently used areas are the telephone directory and local news.

 

One of the reasons behind the portal’s success is the active involvement and support from senior management. “Senior management has been very actively involved during all stages of the development and implementation,” says Nordea Head of Online Group Communications, Kim Grue. “They all use the Intranet heavily supported by their own Communication Partner and their Management Support functions.”

 

The Intranet portal is owned by Group Identity and Communications. Ownership includes the whole infrastructure and management of user rights and roles. Group Identity and Communications also owns the News channels. The different business areas owns their own content including area specific applications. Of course all groups have to comply with the policies and guidelines established by Group Identity and Communications.

 

The portal has a powerful technology backbone that includes:

 

l       Portal: BEA (with single sign-on)

l       Search engine: Autonomy

l       Content publisher: A custom built web-based Java-publisher

l       IT platform (information container): Lotus Notes

l       Statistics: ClientStep (Instadia/Omniture)

 

The intranet is a personalized portal so information is organized and presented to personal preferences, but also by relevant country, business unit, and organization.

 

My analysis: one of the most user-friendly and simple to use personalize portal implementations I’ve seen. It looks simple to use and it strikes a nice balance between too much white space and too much clutter. I particularly like the simple-as-pie information architecture centered on five intuitive sections: The Group, News, Organization, Customer, and Employee.