Swiss Life - Intranet - Case Study

Swiss Life is the No1 provider of Insurance & mortgage solutions in Switzerland and one of Europe’s leading financial service companies.

The Brief

With Over 11,000 staff throughout Europe, Swiss Life like many other international corporations has a complex set of intranet requirements.

The brief was to work with Swiss Life to create an intranet strategy and platform, which would improve and develop internal knowledge management, information sharing, content publishing, workflow and community.

The Challenge

With a project such as this, there were a number of critical issues and challenges:

• The negotiation & ratification of complex requirements across departments, markets and regions.
• The definition of the intranet's architecture in a continuously evolving organisation.
• The development of a de-centralised publishing and editorial process which does not require a large management resource.
• The development of navigation metaphors for searching and navigating a mixture of multi-lingual content across regions and business units.

The Result

After a year of hard work, the intranet was launched, receiving a large amount of positive feedback from users.

The end solution consisted of a multi-site multi-lingual publishing system based on Day Networks Communique providing Swiss Life with:

• De-centralised publishing workflows, allowing individuals/teams to create their own mini-intranets with their own individual requirements.
• An editorial metaphor for organising and linking the various intranet sites, allowing the intranet architecture to grow and evolve based on the organisations needs and requirements.
• Centralised content repositories which share content more efficiently providing content syndication and cross media publishing workflow.

The key benefits of the solution are:

• Future proof solution - The intranet can evolve and adapt as the organisation does due to the decentralised publishing metaphor which was developed.
• An extensible architecture - A modular approach has been taken allowing for new components to be added, extending functionality simply without impacting the over all architecture.
• Cost savings - With the introduction of a single intranet platform, the Swiss Life group is in a position to make significant costs savings as individual intranets are migrated.
• Resource sharing - New features and functions which would have previously been implemented on a department by department basis can now be developed and shared.
• Improved content management and information sharing - Multi-lingual content across regions and departments is easily published and browsed
• Improved user experience - Overall improvement in quality and continuity of internal information systems.