An insurance company that specializes in business insurance and risk management services for select industries was struggling to provide their 2,300 employees with an employee portal system that kept users engaged and informed. They desired to provide their employees with a much more modern employee portal that leveraged the latest web technologies while making it easier for business users to contribute content. With the ability for business stakeholders to own and manage content on the site, the company believed the new portal would be updated more frequently, which would make it stickier and keep users coming back.

Business Objective

The company had old intranet infrastructure that included 28 Oracle Site Studio Sites. The process for the company’s various business units to contribute content to the site basically involved emailing Word documents to the company’s IT department. IT would then get them checked into their old WebCenter Content system that supported the SiteStudio system. Once the documents were converted to a web-viewable format, it would appear on the site. Since IT did not have a dedicated administrator for the portal, change requests typically took days and sometimes even weeks. With the company’s rapid growth, disseminating information to employees quickly and effectively became a priority. The employee portal was seen as the single place where employees could access company, department and role-specific information – on their desktop or mobile device. The company needed a new portal solution backed by strong content management capabilities to make this possible. Furthermore, Oracle Site Studio was being sunsetted, so the company needed to move off an old and unsupported system and onto a modern portal platform that had a development roadmap to support their business needs now and into the future. The company chose Oracle WebCenter Content and Portal 12c as this new system.

The company’s goals for the new employee portal were:

• Expand what the business can do without IT involvement
• Better engage and inform employees
• Less manual, more dynamic portal content
• Improve overall portal usability
• Smart navigation – filter menus by department and role
• Mobile access

Because of several differentiators and experience, the insurance company chose Fishbowl Solutions to help them meet their goals. The company really liked that Fishbowl offered a packaged solution that they felt would enable them to go to market faster with their new portal. Effectively, the company was looking for a portal framework that included the majority of what they needed – navigation, page templates, taskflows, etc. – that could be achieved with less coding and more configuration. This solution is called Portal Solution Accelerator.

Oracle WebCenter Paired with Fishbowl’s Portal Solution Accelerator

After working together to evaluate the problems, goals, strategy, and timeline, Fishbowl created a plan to help them create their desired Portal. Fishbowl offered software and services for rapid deployment and portal set up by user experience and content integration. Fishbowl upgraded the company’s portal from SiteStudio to Oracle WebCenter Portal and Content 12c. Fishbowl’s Portal Solution Accelerator includes portal and content bundles consisting of a collection of code, pages, assets, content and templates. PSA also offers content integration, single-page application (SPA) task flows, and built-in personalization. These foundational benefits for the portal resulted in a reduction in time-to-market, speed and performance, and developer-friendly design.

Results

After implementing the new Portal and various changes, the content publishing time was reduced by 90 percent as the changes and updates now occur in hours instead of days or weeks, which encourages users to publish content. The new Framework allows for new portals to be created with little work from IT. Additionally, the in-place editor makes it easy for business users to edit their content and see changes in real-time. Role-based contribution and system-managed workflows streamline to content governance. The new mega-menu provided by the SPA provides faster, more intuitive navigation to intranet content. This navigation is overlaid with Google Search integration, further ensuring that users can find the content they need. Most of the components used in the intranet are reusable and easy to modify for unique cases. Therefore, the company can stay up-to-date with minimal effort. Finally, the Portal has phone, tablet, and desktop support making the intranet more accessible, ensuring repeat visits.

Overall, the national insurance company has seen an immense change in content publishing time reduction, ease of editing content, and managing and governing the portal since working with Fishbowl. The solutions that Fishbowl created and implemented helped decrease weekly internal support calls from twenty to one.