Customer Overview

The National Roads and Motorists’ Association (the NRMA) is Australia’s largest member-owned organisation, with 2.4 million members across New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. In recent years the NRMA has expanded beyond its original roadside offering, to help members across a broad range of services, including NRMA MotorServe service centres, NRMA Emergency Home Assist, NRMA Travel, holiday accommodation through NRMA Holiday Parks and car rental, where NRMA owns Thrifty Car Rental in Australia and New Zealand.

Business Situation

NRMA has a cloud strategy designed to reduce operational overheads, while allowing ICT to provide NRMA employees with a modern set of collaboration tools through cloud and mobile technologies. In line with this strategy, a decision was made to develop a new Group Intranet that would merge a disparate set of 6 existing intranets across the NRMA Group, to a consolidated platform that would improve usability, sharing of information and cross-organisational collaboration. Planned integration of Yammer, the enterprise social network, would work to improve user adoption and engagement on the basis of removing barriers to use, such as lack of single sign-on (SSO).

Solution

The first step was to design and set the foundations to facilitate the organisation’s adoption of cloud services. Initial consultations identified a number of key technology areas which needed to be addressed to ensure a successful deployment of the Group Intranet, and to position the NRMA Group for successful rollout of future cloud services. Identity Management was key to facilitating this functionality.

Ever since the NRMA’s procurement of Thrifty Australia and New Zealand, both locations were responsible for their own Active Directory forests to provide authentication and authorisation for resources and services. While the NRMA is now looking to Office 365 to provide a single email platform for the organisation, the environment in the short term consisted of multiple Active Directory environments containing multiple, and sometimes duplicated identities, as well as multiple email environments.

Prior to the Group Intranet launch, ADFS was implemented to support SSO for a seamless user experience. Yammer was a key social component of the Group Intranet but was not yet fully integrated with Office 365. By leveraging the Active Directory Federation Services and Yammer directory synchronisation service, this allowed Kloud to build a custom web part so Yammer would appear to staff as a tightly integrated component on the Group Intranet. Kloud helped the NRMA develop the Group Intranet on the SharePoint Online platform. The project was executed using the Agile scrum methodology to ensure rapid delivery of the Group Intranet and maximum value to the organisation.

Given the diverse workforce at NRMA, it was vital that all employees could use the Group intranet on multiple devices to ensure they could stay informed and access content anywhere, at any time. This included ensuring access via mobile devices targeting iOS, Android and the Windows Phone platform. To facilitate this, the Group Intranet was developed using the latest responsive frameworks like Bootstrap. The NRMA’s frontline Road Assist Patrols need to access the intranet in the field to help members using a rugged tablet, making it essential the design was responsive to a range of mobile devices.

Due to the diversity of employee roles at the NRMA, the organisation wanted to ensure the home page was developed to display relevant content to the user based on their area of work. For example, NRMA Patrols would see different tailored content to Thrifty employees. As the out of the box content targeting capabilities were not sufficient to address this requirement, Kloud developed a custom targeting framework to support this. The overall result was a modern, responsive, social, targeted and intuitive Group Intranet to help the NRMA collaborate and communicate effectively across the group.

Benefits

  • Blue accessible from anywhere as it is hosted in the cloud (SharePoint Online)
  • Multi-device accessibility i.e. desktops and a range of mobile devices
  • Targeted content to ensure only relevant content is surfaced to end users
  • Integrated enterprise social experience (Yammer)
  • As the Group Intranet is hosted on SharePoint Online, it is up to date in terms of latest features released by Microsoft
  • Reduced dependency on IT to manage and support the platform
  • SharePoint Online providing a powerful foundation for document collaboration and content management.

“Kloud Solutions worked hard to truly understand our business and the unique challenges we faced in developing a Group-wide intranet for a very diverse workforce. Their knowledge and expertise helped us deliver a strong platform that not only meets our needs now, but is flexible enough to grow with our organisation into the future. Their approach to working with us and their insights into what we wanted to achieve played a critical role in the successful launch of our intranet.” – Kristy Tuinman, Senior Project Manager and Holly Payne, Group Intranet Manager, NRMA

Category:
ADFS, Case Study, Communication and Collaboration, Identity and Access Management, Office 365, SharePoint, User Experience
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