Comments from Discovery Health staff about their intranet include: “I love the intranet we have”, “Our intranet is the best!”, “Overall I think DNA is an awesome tool.”, “Well done for the good work and making our work simple.”, “The Intranet system is great compared to other companies”.
Discovery Health is the largest private health care insurer in South Africa. Major products include life insurance, health insurance, the DiscoveryCard and Vitality – a program which rewards healthy behaviour.
The main reasons staff love their intranet include:
- It is essential for doing daily work. Detailed product information needed to support Discovery Health’s customers and the wider community is provided on the intranet.
- Many processes are automated, such as career management, employee recognition and leave management
- The home page is highly customisable using 'widgets'. This means that most of this valuable intranet real estate provides content that is directly relevant to each individual staff member
- Content quality is rigorously managed through regular audits, restricting the number of authors, work flows and approval. Staff can rely on the content
- Collaboration spaces have been separated from the intranet ensuring the content quality of the intranet is maintained but still supports ongoing feedback loops
- All business applications are accessible through the intranet
Of the 44 questions that comprise the WIC survey, Discovery Health rated either #1 or #2 in the following:
- Intranet home page
- Overall look and feel
- Ability to complete forms online
- Access to policies and procedures
- Information about our products and services
- Understanding of the organisation’s values and culture
- Using menus to find information
- Access to templates
- Access to reports
- Access to business applications
- Ability to personalise the intranet
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Top intranet tips from Discovery Health
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So how did they do it?
The Discovery Health Intranet, known as Discovery Net Access (DNA), supports approximately 6,500 employees. 2,500 of these staff comprise the Discovery Health call centre.
The intranet consists of two main sections:
- Discovery Net Access (DNA) – includes the home page used by most staff. This provides typical intranet type content such as policies, forms, standard operating procedures, news, and access to business applications
- PinPoint – is a knowledge repository specifically for customer support staff. It contains all the information staff need to answer customer queries, including a detailed breakdown of every product provided by Discovery. This includes advice on how best to explain the products to members, brokers, health professionals, and other employees. It is used heavily on a continuous basis by around 2,500 call centre staff.
The intranet was developed in-house using a Weblogic backend, Java frontend and Apache webservers. Much of the infrastructure that was developed for the public facing web site was re-used on the intranet. This helped minimise development and support costs.
The team
The new intranet was launched in February 2010.
Jamie Whittaker is the Development Manager who was responsible for this launch. Jamie manages the web development and content management teams. They are responsible for Web content management (Documentum), Discovery.co.za, Discovery Net Access (DNA), and the enterprise content management system (SharePoint).
Note: SharePoint is used as an unstructured collaboration tool and information repository. It is not part of the intranet.
Odette Fenix is the Knowledge Manager. She is responsible for managing the team who maintain the product knowledge repository (Pinpoint) and the management of the information architecture.
She is also the business owner driving the strategy of digital servicing channels within the intranet, web, mobile and email communication systems.
Approach to intranet design
The first phase in designing the new intranet consisted of base-lining the current intranet. Key findings from this baseline showed that:
- There was a lack of trust in the information – staff were not sure if information was accurate and up-to-date
- Staff wanted to find information more quickly and be sure the information they had was correct, trusted & complete
The development approach taken was a mixture of the agile and waterfall methodologies. A formal scope and requirements document was defined at the beginning of the project but most of the functionality was implemented incrementally. The main benefit of this approach was to ensure regular progress was made throughout the project, while at the same time clearly defining the scope of the project.
The primary stakeholder for the project was the COO. Other stakeholders included Human Resources and business representatives. The project was driven primarily by the Knowledge Management team together with Systems.
Approach to authoring
Discovery Health use a centralised approach to creating content. Only a small group of nominated staff can add content. The advantages of this approach include:
- Reduces the risk of exposure of providing incorrect information to customers (which has the potential to be costly)
- Reduces CMS licensing costs (less authors require fewer licences)
- More rigorous controls - through structured work flow and approval processes - can be applied to the way content is published, ensuring a higher level of quality
- Makes the review of content quality easier - content is reviewed each 6 months to ensure it is still valid. If not validated by content owner, it is removed.
As a result of this approach, the quality of content has improved (in the previous intranet - pre – February 2010 - there were approximately 150 authors. This was reduced to 18).
Since this new approach to content quality, the number of reports of out-of-date or inaccurate content has decreased dramatically.
Home page, look and feel and personalisation
Discovery Health rated number #1 for both the questions: ‘I like the intranet home page’ and ‘I like the look and feel of the intranet’. They also ranked number #2 for the question, ‘I can personalise the intranet’.
We asked Jamie the reasons why he thought this was the case. His key points include:
- The home page is fully customisable with ‘widgets’ that can be dragged and dropped and placed where staff want them. There are 3 basic types of widgets available to staff:
- Human Resources – this includes a prosperity point counter where staff earn points for living a healthy life, leave information, and a career and training information
- External feeds – this includes local and international news and social media RSS feeds
- Internal content – this includes recently updated content, content that is rated highly by staff and content that appears often in search results
- Staff can choose their own home page – they are not forced to view the same ‘corporate’ intranet page. There are a number of potential home pages that staff are likely to choose including DNA, PinPoint (for call centre staff) and TechPoint (for technical information)
- The PinPoint page provides an alerts widget that cannot be moved. The Alerts widget provides updates about key content that has changed such as a product description updates or the addition of a new product. This content is pushed out by knowledge management team. Staff have 2 options available when dealing with alerts:
- They can acknowledge the alert which is then archived (reports are pulled on all reports to assess compliance)
- They can indicate they don’t understand the alert and someone will get back to them and provide them with more information
The home page was designed by an internal graphics team including usability experts. Several wireframes were proposed to users and eventually narrowed down to the final solution. The usability people conducted some testing by asking staff to complete tasks using the proposed wireframes.
Work tasks/forms/templates
Discovery Health rated highly in many of the questions related to using the intranet to complete work tasks, including the use of online forms (#1), templates (#2), policies & procedures (#1), access to business applications (#2) & completing tasks online (#3).
The high rankings can be attributed to the following reasons:
- PinPoint is needed to process all customer calls. It provides the detailed product and process knowledge needed to respond correctly to customer questions.
- Staff rely heavily on online content. Printing is discouraged because content can change and there is no guarantee that the printed version is the latest.
- DNA contains all the standard operating procedures – for example, applying for leave, approving leave, updating personal details and monitoring health. Many of these procedures can be completed online.
- A Learning Management System enables staff to manage their own training and career development
- All internal applications are accessible through DNA. They are not all necessarily built and hosted using the intranet technology but they are accessible through the intranet. Examples of these applications include the internal recognition system (the Star Awards) career management, book a meeting room, Lexus Nexus (a news service), lead management, SMS management, a prescription calculator and crime reporting.
Search/menus
Discovery Health rated in the top 4 for each of the four survey questions about finding information. Tips about how to improve the way staff find information include:
Search
The intranet menu has two navigation tabs – menu and index. Staff can navigate using either tab
- The index list provides a predictive search – after staff have entered the first 3 letters, the predictive search narrows the number of matches in the index list to match what staff have entered
- The search technology used is Google minis. This also provides predictive text after 3 letters – more letters will minimise the list. Matching terms can then be further filtered by content type or category
- The new intranet replaced a cumbersome ‘fly out’ method with a modern ‘ipod’ like functionality.
- A marker at the top of the navigation tells you where you are in the intranet hierarchy
- A breadcrumb trail shows where you have come from. Staff are able to click on the each item in the trail of the breadcrumb and a drop down of menu list items appears.
- A limitation of the old site was that it was only possible to navigate 3 levels in the hierarchy – this was not enough. The new intranet enables the hierarchy to go beyond 3 levels
- In effect they have moved from 2 methods of finding information to 4, and have tried to cater for all of our users navigation and search preferences without making the site cumbersome or cluttered.
- The DNA menu was aligned with an existing structure identified by the HR Group. This consisted of grouping content by:
- You – benefits specific to staff
- Your work – tools and applications – profiled to the user and the team and function they perform
- Your Company– general information about the company, including policies and procedures
- PinPoint comprises 80,000 content items. High-level navigation is classified according to the various products offered by Discovery. Sub-level navigation items were classified according to the card sorting technique and a team of information architects categorised every item over 5 full working days. After the content was mapped, it was audited to ensure that it was still relevant. This resulted in a reduction in the amount of content by around 20%.
- Every page on intranet can be rated. The benefits of rating content are that:
- Good content can be found more easily
- Poor quality content can be detected and remedial action taken
- A widget is available from the home page shows highest rated content and topics that people are searching for the most.
- Quick link tabs are available on every page – content that is referred to on a daily basis can be easily added to quick links
Browsing or navigating
- The new intranet replaced a cumbersome ‘fly out’ method with a modern ‘ipod’ like functionality.
- A marker at the top of the navigation tells you where you are in the intranet hierarchy
- A breadcrumb trail shows where you have come from. Staff are able to click on the each item in the trail of the breadcrumb and a drop down of menu list items appears.
- A limitation of the old site was that it was only possible to navigate 3 levels in the hierarchy – this was not enough. The new intranet enables the hierarchy to go beyond 3 levels
- In effect they have moved from 2 methods of finding information to 4. They have tried to cater for all of our users navigation and search preferences without making the site cumbersome or cluttered.
Other comments
- Every page on intranet can be rated. The benefits of rating content are that:
- Good content can be found more easily
- Poor quality content can be detected and remedial action taken
- A widget is available from the home page shows highest rated content and topics that people are searching for the most.
- Quick links tab on every page – content that is referred to on a daily basis can be added to quick links
Summary
The Discovery Health intranet provides an impressive range of services and functionality that clearly meets the needs of its staff.
Research from the WIC has shown that an intranet that supports business processes is one of the keys to providing an effective intranet. The Discovery Health intranet clearly meets this requirement through the PinPoint product knowledge repository. This feature alone adds real value to Discovery Health by making sure frontline staff have the ability to effectively support customers.
Interested in benchmarking your own intranet?
If you are interested in obtaining feedback about your own intranet and comparing it anonymously with over 60 organisations, why not register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). This is a free service.
Upcoming Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) workshops
Learn about other leading intranet practices at the upcoming WIC workshops:
Amsterdam
Monday 27th June
London
Thursday, June 30th
Friday, 1st July
Manchester
Tuesday, 5th July
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