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Intranet Case Study: Using OpenRoad's Social Software

4/4/2007

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ThoughtFarmer achieved these desired effects: Placemaking employees on separate continents are now "meeting" through the intranet and gaining insight on each other's ideas, thoughts, and innovations around real estate development.

Pervasive use

Placemaking had a traditional, one-to-many intranet prior to ThoughtFarmer. Since the launch of the collaborative intranet, use has increased tenfold. Use is also pervasive. There were 1,486 unique users in the second quarter after launch; with just over 250 employees, this means that over a thousand non-Placemaking employees (mostly employees of the parent company, Intrawest) used Placemaking's intranet. As one Intrawest employee wrote, "I love the dynamic nature of your intranet. I wish the rest of the organization would go the same route. I find it difficult to go back to [the corporate intranet] after using the Placemaking intranet … thank you for sharing this wonderful resource with the rest of the company."

Reduced Cost

Placemaking's vision for the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet was to develop, launch, and maintain it without an increase in staffing and with a minimal capital investment. ThoughtFarmer's "everyone-as-editor" concept complemented this plan perfectly, as it resulted in an employee web site that is group-maintained by the entire company. With all 250-odd Placemaking employees as editors, the intranet is constantly updated and self-healing.

Attracting and Retaining New Talent

Intrawest Placemaking strives to hire talented people, and the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet provides Placemaking with a strategic hiring advantage.

The generation of employees currently entering the workforce grew up immersed in a digital world. The internet plays a significant role in their personal and social lives, from instant messaging to peer-to-peer filesharing to virtual communities. They publish and participate in online social networks and swap ideas as casually as they swap songs and videos. When this generation joins a firm only to find a staid, traditional intranet with a tightly controlled publishing model, they can become disappointed and unengaged.

By contrast, ThoughtFarmer embraces the principles of openness, participation and interactivity that are the norm for both "Generation Y" and the online social systems they dominate, such as MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. One recent hire at Placemaking commented, "The intranet rocks!! What an incredibly powerful tool."

Uniting a Geographically Dispersed Workforce

Placemaking has six regional offices in Canada, the United States, and Europe in addition to the home office. Most of the more than 250 employees at these offices have never met face to face. But ThoughtFarmer has brought these people together and helped them to feel like part of a community, rather than just employees of the same organization.

As employees upload photos, anecdotes, and reveal more of their individuality and personality, the popularity of the intranet continues to build.

The Idea That Saved $500,000

Mike Hartigan, a Placemaking project manager in Vancouver, was overseeing the construction of a 61,000 square foot, heated-tile entranceway for a new condo-hotel. The project would traditionally have required the radiant subcontractor to return for each of the 33 concrete pours to lay piping amongst rebar. Then Hartigan had an idea: instead of laying tile, just complete the slab, lay all the radiant piping on top, apply a two-inch layer of colored concrete with an aggregate, and then polish it.

Hartigan's innovative method saved $500,000 on a $2 million job, improved coordination among the trades, reduced the project timeline, and gave a stunning, better-than-tile appearance. Hartigan then created a page about his experience on the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet. Other project managers in Florida and Nevada posted comments to the page, asking further questions. In response, Hartigan posted photos of the finished job and addressed their comments. Other construction managers planned to use the technique on future projects.

Placemaking manages dozens of multi-million dollar developments a year. As Hartigan's technique is implemented, Placemaking will save millions of dollars. Without Placemaking's everyone-as-editor collaboration system, ideas such as Hartigan's could never have been shared in such a discoverable, accessible, permanent format.

Impact

The impact that ThoughtFarmer has made at Intrawest Placemaking is summed up by Drew Stotesbury, president of Placemaking:

"One of the benefits associated with the Placemaking intranet, the Portal, has been a dramatic increase in the frequency and quality of collaboration across our organization, a feat which was a challenge in the past due to a geographically distributed employee base and email saturation. The Portal evolved in a short time from a simple news posting board to a living community which supported the sharing of news, ideas and information.

It allowed our critical roles, our development and construction managers, to share innovations that had an immediate impact on the efficiency and quality of our developments. It allowed our employees to share personal information, strengthening relationships between team members who often worked miles apart. It communicated that our leaders trust and value our employee base, now the authors of our intranet, and promoted accountability."