SharePoint Intranet for an International Bank

Challenge

In line with digital transformation of the business and in order to upgrade internal communication, the client required an intranet that would serve as a collaboration hub for 90,000 bank employees globally and withstand 10,000 concurrent users. This internal portal was to:

• Accommodate the full organizational structure
• Support processes throughout the company’s international branches
• Integrate with multiple banking systems
• Have a custom UI design for each user role

For better adoption, the portal needed a mobile version that would enable employees scattered all over the world to work any time and anywhere.

The client turned to ITSTEADY for a full-scale design and implementation of the intranet from scratch.

Project

ITSTEADY put together an expert team specially for this project, with competencies in business analysis, front-end development, SharePoint development and functional testing. The client pursued the following goals:

1. Introduce a global collaboration hub for employees.
2. Build a platform for data, knowledge and policy distribution and sharing.
3. Provide a convenient, secure, and automated workspace for projects and teams.
4. Introduce social collaboration features and an engaging UI to facilitate intranet adoption across the multinational staff.
5. Provide powerful financial analytics tools via integrations with core banking systems.

To meet the client’s requirements, the Waterfall model with a fixed budget was adopted. The scope and timelines of the project were agreed in advance and then refined during the Analysis and Design phases.

Even under the Waterfall model, the team had a large degree of autonomy as they dealt with multiple teams and stakeholders on the client’s side, with different levels of involvement in their own projects.

ITSTEADY’s team delivered an intranet based on the SharePoint 2016 On-Premises cluster with distributed server roles. The new portal created connective tissue for all of the bank employees, supporting divisional, departmental, team, and personal employee sites.

The portal is equipped with a rich set of business widgets and supports the bank’s main processes, including:

• Document management
• Learning management
• Contact management
• Financial analytics
• Content management
• Enterprise search

A friendly UI was developed to reflect the company’s workflows for various user roles and to encourage adoption, which was an initial challenge.

ITSTEADY’s team successfully addressed the risk of integrating the portal with third-party systems as well as the client’s legacy systems without modern API capabilities.

Results

Within eight months, the client was able to introduce a global collaboration hub for all its employees, with features enabling content management, quality management, learning delivery and business management, among other functions. The portal is now capable of sustaining 10,000 concurrent users.

The intranet was integrated with multiple banking systems to allow for rich financial analytics and a flexible security model compliant with banking industry regulations. The social collaboration features and custom, adaptive UI fostered user adoption across all 90,000 employees.

The project was completed successfully, on time and on budget. The client now uses the intranet on a daily basis, with ongoing ICT support from ITSTEADY.