case study — Connect

Connect was the first Web-based intranet for Household International, a Fortune 200 financial services corporation with headquarters in the Chicago area.

Household had been using and customizing a mainframe-based internal news/calendar/content/email system since 1987. The system had powerful functionality, but it was difficult to learn, and the hardware supporting it was not being supported by the manufacturer after December 2002. Household selected Content Company to conduct the content strategy for the intranet over much larger competitors PriceWaterhouse Coopers, Andersen Consulting, Braun Consulting and Closerlook.

Content Company’s responsibilities included

• analyzing existing content in a variety of internal sources
• working with content owners to assess what content existed, what should be deleted and what was missing
• identifying necessary templates to accommodate needed content types
• developing a folder structure for the existing content
• training content owners on using Interwoven TeamSite, the content management system that Household had purchased

We worked closely with the information architecture team, which was concerned with delivering multiple applications through a single interface, and a diverse team of business representatives, who wanted to highlight different amounts and types of information on consistently designed section “landing pages.”

Longtime Household employees were extremely resistant to the idea of the new intranet. However, an online employee survey conducted six weeks after the intranet’s launch in October 2002 showed that 65 percent were more satisfied with Connect than they had been with the previous intranet.

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