Major North American Bank: Intranet Portal Strategy

Financial institutions are increasingly relying on portal solutions to achieve high performance by delivering timely information to their workers. Accenture helped this major bank with an intranet portal strategy that is expected to deliver millions of dollars in benefits.

With more than 50,000 employees around the world, NABank (a major North American bank) offers a full range of financial products and services to approximately 13 million customers worldwide through three key business lines: personal and commercial banking, wealth management and wholesale banking.

In order to compile and share customer, business and job-related information necessary for its employees to serve customers effectively, the bank had invested in a number of intranet-based content and portal systems.

In recent years, however, NABank's employee portal environment had become fragmented, with multiple technologies used to store, organize and deliver content. The decentralized approach, with no mandated use of standards, had resulted in poor-quality information that was often inconsistent or out of date.

Furthermore, each of the bank's business lines had developed multiple independent sites, investing a significant amount of money in content and portal systems without a focus on measurable return. Redundancies in coding, management and maintenance meant that total cost of ownership for the systems was unnecessarily high, and the bank had no clear method by which to monitor costs. The bank also had a significant inventory of underutilized licenses. Ultimately, the portal environment was exacting a high business cost to the bank: executive decision making was hampered, and customer interactions and service were being compromised.

Ongoing Accenture research into the characteristics of high-performance businesses has shown that the most successful companies are those that can provide timely information to employees through technology so they can deliver an excellent, branded experience at every customer touch point. Portals are one leading method of achieving excellence in customer management and service.

Previous attempts by the bank to resolve its issues with content development and portal strategies had not been successful because the approach had been too exclusively technological in nature, with insufficient effort to also address the processes, organization and governance needed if the solution was truly to deliver business benefit.

To advance toward high performance supported by an effective enterprise intranet program, NABank looked to team with a services provider with relevant experience in the broad spectrum of skills and experience—workforce performance, employee experience and portal and content technologies—necessary for success. Accenture was the logical choice, having worked with NABank for many years on a variety of initiatives.

The Accenture team quickly mobilized to begin an initial phase of work, collaborating closely with the bank to assess existing capabilities and create an overall strategic roadmap for the company's long-term enterprise intranet plans. Specifically, Accenture worked with NABank to help its management:

• Research and understand industry-leading practices and trends for portals and other knowledge management and collaboration tools.
  
  
• Benchmark each of the bank's intranet sites and knowledge management capabilities against these industry leading practices.
  
  
• Develop a practical viewpoint about which existing capabilities could be leveraged as part of the enterprise intranet strategy, as well as areas where new capabilities would be required.
  
  
• Understand how to sequence the introduction of new capabilities, bearing in mind the critical enablers such as operating model, governance, collaboration by the lines of business, content management and cultural change.
  
  
• Define an actionable three-year plan and articulate a business case that would support definitive advancements toward high performance through the implementation of a common enterprise portal.

The road map defined three functional components built on a common architecture. The first component identified was a set of workforce portals designed to present specific, timely and accurate information to employees to perform their jobs optimally.

The second component was a common corporate area where content intended for all bank workforces could be published. The common area also includes homogeneous and persistent access to self-service capabilities and core Web-based tools including technical support, HR functions and an employee directory. To demonstrate to management a better way of developing and maintaining their intranet sites, the Accenture team created a pilot of this corporate launch page with selected functionality. The pilot launch page was up and running within five months of starting the program.

The final component of the plan involved specific, standardized department sites that would serve as storefronts to information for employees of NABank. These department sites would replace content found on the bank's existing intranet, but would present the content in a more consistent way, and according to a re-architected taxonomy. Again, the development team piloted one of these sites using the bank's small business banking unit. This site not only demonstrated specific functionality, but also showed to the bank's executive team how Accenture' holistic approach—combining governance, content quality, management processes and workforce alignment—supported the overall portal strategy.

Accenture's Offshore Content Migration Services (CMSS) provided an interesting exercise that helped the bank formulate their own approach to moving content. The CMSS team participated with NABank in a two-week pilot test to plan and migrate existing intranet content into the new environment. This test, during which the CMSS team successfully migrated 60 high-quality documents, enabled the Intranet Strategy team to get a jump start on content migration activities.

With an eye on establishing progress signposts on the road to high performance, Accenture has worked with NABank management to establish a balanced scorecard to measure the enterprise intranet program's ongoing achievement of business objectives. The scorecard measures such things as content quality assurance, financial performance and operational status. Workforce productivity is another important metric. Already, users of the new small business banking intranet site find that they are saving time and serving customers more effectively because they are finding rich, high-quality information in less time.

Other preliminary feedback from users has been extremely positive. According to one supervisor, "The new intranet site has given us a taste of what can be accomplished through the enterprise intranet program. We can see, even within the constraints of our current technology environment, how an employee portal can increase workforce capacity. Our people are more productive and engaged because they have what they need to do their jobs."

NABank is exploring the implementation of a three-year program to extend this work throughout its banking units. Preliminary analysis by NABank and Accenture has shown that the three-year program to continue intranet development could deliver $40 million to $60 million in cost savings to the bank by increasing employee task productivity, employee and customer satisfaction, and ultimately top-line revenue. The program also would deliver value by decreasing operating costs and the time needed for a new worker to achieve competent levels of performance.

Bank executives have been impressed by the approach taken on this program because it has demonstrated how such a program can deliver business value while minimizing technology investment. With comprehensive governance structures, methods to assure the quality of information, and the design of meaningful incentives, Accenture has helped NABank to advance in measurable ways toward high performance.

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