A New Digital Home for Dataport AöR
Company-Wide Networking thanks to the New Social Intranet
Realizing a Successful Social Intranet Launch with Change Management
Moving Closer Together in the Digital Home
Dynamic
Corporate Structure
With the overall project, a social intranet could be created that maps changes flexibly and thereby supports a more dynamic corporate culture, which is open to changes now or later and promotes an open-minded exchange with each other.
Making Information
Transparent
By means of the implementation, Dataport AöR established a clearer structure for its new intranet that is much more transparent to the users. This way, contacts and information can be found easier, while special possibilities for customization prevent a flood of information from all sides.
Improved
Satisfaction
Involvement of collaborators at an early point and the needs-based measures derived from this have been developed so as to prepare the upcoming transformation in the most optimal way possible. Preserving the feeling of “we” was an absolute priority to the project team.
Interdepartmental
Networking
The introduction of different communities and the assignment of corresponding roles promotes interdepartmental communication and simultaneously strengthens the sense of responsibility among these units. This type of networking raises the dedication of the entire staff.
Dataport AöR is the IT service provider from the north of the country for public administration in Germany. Citizens and businesses entrust their sensitive data on a daily basis to public institutions and the administration and the digital processing of this data should not only be safe but also efficient and reliable. Through the development of innovative IT services, which make the administrative processes simple for authorities and citizens, Dataport is a central driver for the digital transformation of society together with the federal states and municipalities. Teamwork in agile teams and projects is a daily task of the 4,300 employees in six states and a clear strength of Dataport’s corporate culture.
- Information and communications industry
- approx. 4,300 employees
- Headquarters in Altenholz
Social Intranet at Dataport AöR
Overview of the Project "Designing our Digital Home together"
The comprehensive social intranet project of Dataport AöR was kicked off in April 2021. The strength of Dataport as a company could not be entirely reflected in the intranet up to that point. The hierarchically organized and partly inflexible intranet with centrally controlled editorial processes and the missing consideration of the central motives of the staff was to be replaced. The objective of the overall project was to jointly shape a new digital home to promote the networking within the organization.
The following six target areas were defined:
- Interaction und networking: More innovation by quick networking of collaborators
- Communication: Contemporary, target-oriented, interdepartmental and digital communication in a fast-growing organization
- Dedication: More emphasis on encouraging the active participation of employees, intuitive access and self-explanatory use of the data portal
- Flexibility: Intranet that can reflect the changes at Dataport
- Contribution to knowledge transfer: Simpler exchange of knowledge and experience
- Collaboration: Modern work equipment and offices, as well as document management
The project was implemented for this in collaboration with NEOCOSMO GmbH. The NEOCOSMO platform PIIPE and the underlying open-source CMS Drupal are today the foundation for the newly introduced “data portal”. Data One delivers comprehensive communication and change management concepts for this to achieve broad acceptance of the new digital home for the IT service provider and its collaborators.
Over a period of 15 months, the project team with its 60 members worked on altogether six sub-projects in the topical areas of the social intranet, SharePoint, content migration, communication & change management, infrastructure, and innovation and project management. The collaboration for this took place completely digitally in the form of workshops and regular meetings based on an agile work method. The “communication & change” workstream was overseen and pushed ahead by the experts of Data One. Initial workshops made the start to determine the desired scope of change and possible effects on the organization and to develop corresponding needs of individual groups. Based on this initial planning, the project was split up into smaller work packages and measures were developed, which take these needs appropriately into account. The objective of the change experts was to support the organization that is undergoing change in the best possible way with the help of activities accompanying the project. Among these were project-accompanying communication, the development and management of a kick-off campaign on the way to the go-live, including the planning of roles, editorial process, training as well as the implementation of training and further accompanying activities.
A decentralized editorial team was established at the same time as the development of the social intranet and migration of contents. For this purpose, about 400 editors and administrators were sought, found and trained internal of the organization for the new social intranet by our change experts. Surveys, open consultation hours and a four-week test phase before the go-live with a heterogenous test user group composed of 100 employees served as important measures for acceptance testing and acceptance assurance. This was accomplished by corresponding feedback channels, workshops and a specifically developed feedback catalog concerning technical as well as soft factors in the project. At the end, the internal and external teams could complete the project with great success.
Through successful change management, Dataport AöR completes the step to the social intranet and thereby goes all the way to improved communication, more flexibility and optimized networking and participation at the company.
