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Many companies are reporting that, when it comes to remaking their old intranets, employees are slow to embrace (or even understand) the new intranet concepts of employee-controlled content, social software tools, and other new technologies.

That all-too-common trend of anemic intranet use was the norm at one Canadian company, Intrawest. But a division of Intrawest called Placemaking made significant improvement in intranet usage -- increasing it tenfold to five page views per employee per day -- when it rolled out a new intranet from ThoughtFarmer. The following is a case study on how Intrawest Placemaking did it and how it is affecting employees.

Project history

Placemaking (325 employees) is the real estate development division of Intrawest (25,000 employees). Placemaking develops resort villages worldwide, including Whistler-Blackcomb (British Columbia), Mountain Creek (New Jersey), and Tremblant (Quebec).

Tracy Hutton, director of learning at Placemaking, wanted to leverage the company intranet to create community at the recently re-organized company. She also wanted a better way to capture Placemaking's intellectual capital online.

The existing intranet, released in May 2004, was infrequently updated and poorly used (averaging 0.5 page views per employee per day). Hutton needed to redevelop the new intranet, and then maintain it, without a single full-time person on the project.

Solution: Social Software

Creators of ThoughtFarmer social software, Chris McGrath and Darren Gibbons, approached Hutton with the idea of using wiki-type technology to create a self-sustaining intranet democratically maintained by the entire company.

Hutton embraced the idea and won support of senior management. The redesigned intranet was launched in April 2006 on the ThoughtFarmer social software platform.

Placemaking's new intranet is built on the wiki principle of open editing. All employees have the ability to add and edit content, even on the home page.

Recent changes are listed on the home page and a search engine indexes all content. Pages and people are intertwined: each page is linked to the author's profile and their profile page links to pages by that person.

Unlike wikis, Placemaking's intranet has a hierarchical content structure with auto-generated navigation. It was felt that non-technical business users wouldn't be comfortable with WikiWords and free-form page creation. Instead, clicking the "Add a page" button creates a subpage of the current page.

Tenfold increase in use

At launch, intranet use immediately increased tenfold to 5 page views per employee per day. The increased use has held steady for 6 months.

Use is pervasive. There were 1,486 unique users in the second quarter after launch. With just 325 employees, this means over 1,000 non-Placemaking employees -- mostly employees of the parent company, Intrawest -- used Placemaking's intranet. (Although it's not advertised, all of Intrawest's 25,000 employees -- including those working in the lodging and ski operations divisions -- have read-only access to Placemaking's intranet.)

In September, Mike Hartigan, a Placemaking project manager in Vancouver, created a page about a method of finishing concrete floors that creates an appearance better than tile at a substantially lower cost. Using the method at the entrance to a resort saved $500,000 and reduced the project timeline.

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. The other construction managers planned on using the information on future projects.

On another occasion, a construction manager shared his approach for lighting supply for condo-hotel development. By using a light broker to assemble the lighting package and gather competitive bids, he saved about $200,000 on a typical $30 million project.

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