In an organisation of 8,000 staff, the biggest challenge was to find a way to let users find, share and use content without being overwhelmed by it.

We undertook a staff survey, to which 25 per cent of staff responded. This highlighted the huge level of demand for us to find solutions to the problems that were dogging their existing intranet, and validated the need for a better one.

Staff members were experiencing challenges with the existing intranet, including a great deal of poorly-structured and outdated content, confusing navigation, and a search engine which did not return satisfying results. As a result, staff were abandoning the existing intranet, rather than viewing it as a useful source of corporate information.

CompanyNet created an intranet, which became known as ‘Stan’ (based on 'Standard Life', the company's name at the time), as part of delivering a wider digital workplace that would enable Abrdn to better communicate across teams, departments and locations. Our extensive experience of designing, building and deploying intranets came to the fore in delivering Stan.

The first step was to undertake a large-scale card sort exercise with Abrdn staff in order to design an information architecture that met their expectations.

Then, we used our Kira intranet platform to accelerate the solution to a point where we could quickly start customising and building bespoke features required by Abrdn. We placed social features at the heart of the intranet, including user-generated newsfeeds to complement more traditional intranet features such as corporate news.

Stan was immediately more accessible than its predecessors, not only on the company’s desktop PCs, but for the first time across mobile devices such as phones and tablets. The Abrdn team created a thorough communications plan for introducing and launching the site to their colleagues.

This included the creation of promotional materials, in-office advertising, workshops and training sessions to ensure the smooth transition to the new intranet.

The intranet was launched to Abrdn's offices around the world in February 2016.