Context
Barclays is one of the largest financial services companies in the world, engaged primarily in banking, investment banking and investment management. cScape was appointed to create designs for a portal
that would deliver news to the company as a whole, reaching out to clusters within the company; we also consulted on the development of the technical delivery platform. Pulse is a news-oriented portal site created to ensure that users of intranet services received a coherent message and had a single point of entry.
Challenge
The Barclays intranet comprises 1,500 Microsoft
SharePoint Portal Server sites that are rolled out internationally. It needed more personalisation, clarity in navigation and integration with work practice to be effective – in building Pulse we were effectively changing the home page for every person in the organisation.
Solution
We applied high-level personalisation to ensure that each individual receives the right selection of news, reducing time spent and ensuring that content is relevant to their work. Our consultants also advised Barclays on the structure of their intranet, enabling them to rationalise a navigational system that orchestrates thousands of microsites. Employee engagement was developed through an intranet champion blog.
Outcome
Collaboration with our technical and engagement consultants ensured that the user interface designed by cScape excelled under the scrutiny of third-party user testing. Employees can now specify a combination of general Barclays news; high priority news on share price, HR schemes or global initiatives; individual work area news and user-selected news. The site structure that we defined laid the foundations for a second phase of development – and provided a window to the opportunities it offered.