This April we conducted our most recent Intranet Replacement Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting, consisting of customers who have already made the decision to replace their legacy intranet portal experience with the ServiceNow Platform.
April’s meeting included:
- A recap from January’s meeting
- An expert panel discussion
- A product roadmap presentation delivered by Corey Leamon
Recap of January SIG
Here is a link to the summary of the January 2021 Intranet Replacement Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting and a snapshot of some of the customer presentation from that SIG.
Amdocs will be following up on the prior SIG by presenting their journey in more detail at our Knowledge 2021 virtual conference. You may register for their session by searching for “intranet” on the K21 website and looking for the session information as shown below.
Panel Discussion
Our panel of experts included Angela Cruden (
The Sr. Associate of Intranet & Corporate Affairs, spoke about how great it is to have the support platform and the intranet function together for IT & HR announcements and Corporate News. Consolidating this into a single experience makes it easier for their associates to get news that is relevant to them and to find help when they need it. She went on to explain some of the features they implemented with their partner, Alcor Tech, such as:
1. Portal page microsites for:
- Company Information
- Company Objectives
- Code of Conduct
- Leadership
o Board of Directors
o Executive Committees
- Diversity & Inclusion
2. A global events calendar
3. A bookmarks feature for associates to track their favorite articles
4. A location picker override, so that associates may view knowledge articles that are targeted for employees in other countries if they wish to do so
Rajeev Sethi, VP Employee Experiences at ServiceNow, illustrated our employee experience evolution at ServiceNow by consolidating eight separate service departmental portals into a single employee portal that offers a consumer grade employee experience (EX). Rajeev reinforced the notion that a great EX goes beyond a personalized portal interface. It must factor in elements such as:
- AI-powered, federate search
- Chatbot
- Mobile
- Consolidated To-Do’s and Approvals from many functional systems
ServiceNow’s employee portal and mobile app include:
- announcements from leaders and corporate communications
- informational campaigns
- a feed from Facebook Workplace
- support services
- knowledge articles
- employee journeys
- a conversational experience with natural language understanding (NLU)
- federated search across seven sources
Angela Cruden, Director at ActionHub (formerly the Enterprise Architect at Qube) shared Qube’s story. Qube moved off of a SharePoint intranet portal approximately 10 months ago and onto the ServiceNow Platform. The previous experience was mostly text based and was not visually appealing to the employees. It relied on a folder structure as the informational architecture, which made it difficult and time consuming for employees to find important information and documents. There was no workflow or automation; plus administration of the portal pages and security were cumbersome.
With the ServiceNow portal, designed and implemented with the Orbit and Rocket Fuel products by New Rocket, the user interface was well accepted right off the bat and it became easy to find things. Qube replaced the folder structure-based approach with a search-based approach for finding information. The portal was organized by division with the ability to navigate to divisional microsite pages using left-hand navigation. All pages have a consistent layout and there is a News carrousel that is fed stories by the marketing team, as well as, a corporate Twitter feed.
Qube has since benefited by analyzing the usage metrics. For example, the Deployment Team recognized an opportunity early on to target people in a particular division more directly in order to engage them more effectively.
Angela also offered an insightful answer to a panelist question, which represents what we hear from many ServiceNow customers.
Question: “A lot of companies traditionally used a content management system as the basis of their intranet portal. Why did Qube elect to go with a platform-based approach as the primary employee experience interface?”
Angela’s Response: “We were on SharePoint to start with and there were attempts to either upgrade or reimplement SharePoint. That was an expensive business and it wasn’t really gelling; we would still need some integrations because we had ServiceNow as the catalog and knowledge platform. It wasn’t until I visited Knowledge19 and I saw some presentations from ServiceNow customers that had done these service portals and I guess the penny dropped. You’re familiar that there’s a service portal there, but until you see the skins on them that can make them look and feel much more like an intranet and much more user friendly, it becomes a no brainer almost. You’ve got your catalog in there, you’ve got your knowledge in there, you’ve got all your people in there… it became almost a non-decision in the end. It was very easy.”
For confidentiality, we redacted many details from the following screenshots, but hopefully these pictures provide a good representation of the user interface.
Product Roadmap
Corey Leamon discussed the Communications advancements that are targeted for this summer and also showed some of the recent enhancements, such as Content Preview & Testing that ServiceNow released with our Quebec release this spring. This allows content managers to visualize various content within the context of the portal pages where it is targeted to appear, as a member of a particular audience, and also during different phases of an informational campaign.
