On February 6th 185 of our members relished in the success story of Thomas Iacovantuono, Director of AI & Automation at Organon, who recounted their journey to replace five (5) intranet portals with Employee Center Professional (EC Pro) on ServiceNow. Thomas showed off the amazing “Hera” portal his team designed and deployed with the assistance of Thirdera. Driving Organon were three main goals:
- One access point to get to the information you need - Information is accessible from a unified intranet platform and presented in a consistent manner.
- A more personalized user experience - Content is customized based on your function, market, or a variety of other attributes. Top-navigation menu includes (or excludes) items based on your role, so you see the items you need, without having to sort through the ones you don’t.
- Powerhouse search functionality - Search results include content from Hera, M365/SharePoint, and ServiceNow. Search results are automatically adjusted and ranked by relevancy based on each request and previous actions, so they get even better over time.
Thomas, who also manages Office365 for Organon, said they wanted to use ServiceNow instead of SharePoint for their primary employee experience so they could combine service management and targeted employee communications together. This allows their employees to self-service answers in the ServiceNow knowledge base, as well as engage support from the same initial experience they use for personalized news and announcements. “I believe we struck an optimal balance between employee communications and services with our Hera portal on EC Pro,” Thomas stated. Organon’s teams continue to use SharePoint sites to manage and collaborate on files and documents that those teams use on a regular basis. Organon plans to migrate some SharePoint sites, which are intended for broader employee consumption, to ServiceNow microsites.
Thomas and his team researched several alternative solutions for their modern intranet portal, including SharePoint portal and “Intranet in a box” solutions, but they quickly came to the realization that these other providers could not support the requirement for seamless self-service and services natively with their offerings. Organon did select Coveo as an enterprise search solution to be deployed across the entire organization and they took advantage of the certified Coveo-ServiceNow integration.
After the technology selection process, the timeline continued as such:
- Design (February – March)
- Development (April – June)
- Technical / Business Go-live (Aug - Oct)
The final phase also included training for content managers and the owners of various microsites, plus organizational change management (OCM) to ensure a smooth transition.
Finally, Thomas shared that their partners at Thirdera shared some considerations which hold true:
- There’s no such thing as an OOTB intranet.
- Don’t be afraid of a tailored ServiceNow portal.
- The intranet should not play second fiddle to the public website.
- It’s not a stakeholder portal...it’s for the employees.
- It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
The second half of the SIG meeting focused on the February ’24 release highlights with a special focus on the new video integration framework. This portion of the SIG meeting was recorded, which you can access and share here.
To demonstrate the potential of the video integration framework, we invited Vbrick to share the solutions they’ve created to enable:
- Live streaming (e.g. Town Hall meetings)
- Seamless video library console for content creators
- Secure video access for employees (e.g. no need to re-authenticate)
Both of Vbrick solutions, are available on the ServiceNow store.
Vbrick Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) is for existing Vbrick customers.
Vbrick Video on Demand is for non-customers.
For a short video of the Vbrick integrated video solution with ServiceNow, click here.
