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Borealis is a leading, innovative provider of plastics solutions based on polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP). Like every innovation-driven and R&D company, Borealis is challenged to manage the vast amount of internal knowledge and information.

Borealis chose to face this challenge with a centralized knowledge portal, maintained in one single content management system. Disclosing the information for the various audiences (5400 employees working worldwide in the production facilities, innovation centres and service centres) in an understandable and straightforward way is the key to success.

That’s why Borealis hired the experts of Human Interface Group who assisted the communication and ICT team throughout the entire process from analysis to user support.

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The project

Borealis AG is an international company active in the plastics industry. A central element in their strategy is to create value through innovation; not only in the plastics industry but also for the entire company.

As a leading provider of innovative plastics solutions, with 5400 employees in 8 countries, customers in more then 120 countries and 40 years of experience, Borealis needs to manage a huge amount of knowledge and information. Unfortunately, most of that information is either stored locally or either stored in the employees’ minds. Borealis therefore decided to transform their current intranet and knowledge databases into one company-wide, information-sharing and collaboration platform.

The platform

The new intranet of Borealis runs on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The users

The target audiences of the Borealis intranet are quite diverse:

• Employees who only use the intranet for the phonebook,
• Employees who actively seek information on the intranet or in the knowledge databases,
• Employees who actively provide information to other people.

The challenge

When Borealis decided to transform their existing intranet into a new collaboration and information-sharing platform, the group realized it was facing a huge challenge:

• Borealis needed a place for all organizational units (departments, project teams, networks, etc) to collaborate and share information on a temporary basis.
• But Borealis also needed a place to push - on a more permanent basis - pertinent company information to all Borealis’ employees.

Basically, Borealis was in need of a stable, but flexible information architecture to structure and centralize all available information in one single portal.

What we did

To help define the information architecture and navigational structure of their new intranet and to support them during the whole implementation process, Borealis hired Human Interface Group.

In a first phase, Human Interface Group performed a thorough analysis, consisting of:

• A user analysis to identify the various stakeholders of the new intranet,
• A task analysis to gain insight in the needs of all the stakeholders and to collect the user requirements,
• An information analysis: to gather the content needs for the new intranet and translate it into an intuitive and efficient information architecture.

To acquire the information that Borealis needed for creating its innovative information-sharing and collaboration platform, a combination of methods was used in this analysis phase:

• A card-sorting exercise combined with interviews to set-up the top levels of the information architecture and determine the required functionality,
• Additional interviews with subject matter experts to complete the in-depth levels of information architecture,
• Validation of the various deliverables by specialized sounding boards. The sounding boards were populated with people actively involved in publishing on the intranet and communication within the company. Each of them had a keen interest in evolving towards a user-friendly intranet that offered all functionality for efficiently communicating to their target audience.

The fruits of these efforts were clearly-defined user requirements, a multi-level information architecture and metadata schema facilitating future content expansion (no matter how the organizational structure would evolve), detailed wireframes of the intranet pages visualizing the exact layout of the future intranet and a lot of valuable guidelines to set up a stable web content management system with links to a flexible collaboration environment.

In a second phase Human Interface Group assisted the project team with the:

• Assessment of the different CMS providers and their content management solutions. At the end of the assessment, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 was chosen as content management tool.
• Translation of the information architecture in a well-designed technical architecture. Human Interface Group made sure all user requirements were met when the selection of a certain technical solution was made.
• Engagement and training of the business people by providing them instructions and tools for effective content contribution and publishing. In order to achieve a consistent setup of the different sub-sites, Human Interface Group provided templates for standardized content collection.
• Development of additional templates for the underlying pages and sites.
• Validation of the implementation and the technical components developed the technical team.
• Evaluation of the graphical design.

Close to the release date, Human Interface Group facilitated the work of the publishers by developing a tailor-made user manual and targeted classroom trainings. The clear and detailed instructions of the manual enabled the publishers to independently develop the content of their sites.

Results

In June 2008, Borealis successfully launched the new intranet, which is the solid basis for its company-wide information sharing and collaboration.

A poll conducted in the first week after the go-live, revealed that the majority of Borealis employees highly preferred the new intranet to the old intranet.