Creating a modern, digital workplace is not just about technology. A vital first step in this process is developing a very thorough understanding of how employees work and how they work together.
NEW YORK (PRWEB)
January 06, 2020
West Monroe Partners, a national business and technology consultancy, today announced that Con Edison’s new intranet, “Conor,” has been recognized among the top 10 intranets of 2020 by Nielsen Norman Group. The redesigned intranet, first introduced to employees in February 2018, is featured in detail in Nielsen Norman Group’s new report, Intranet Design Annual 2020: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets.
West Monroe and Con Edison, one of the nation’s largest investor-owned energy-delivery companies, collaborated to develop Conor. The intranet brings more than 15,000 employees across several utility subsidiaries together in one modern, digital workplace that promotes the company’s safety, engagement, operational excellence, and customer service goals. Its many new features include enhanced search and navigation capabilities, a standard look-and-feel, the ability to personalize content by role and municipal borough, and redesigned employee communications, as well as digital forms that streamline work.
“Our intranet serves people in diverse roles, so it is important that it offers a flexible and fluid way to surface content that is highly relevant to users and targets communications to the right groups,” said Lionel Ing, Con Edison’s project sponsor. “In addition to helping us achieve critical business goals, modernizing our workplace will save on costs by reducing the time employees spend locating tools and information, employing standard templates to develop departmental content and sites, and introducing new digital forms with automated workflows.”
Most Con Edison employees use Conor every day. Satisfaction with the new intranet increased 30% following the launch. Additionally, search utilization increased by 50%, enabling greater employee self-service and engagement. Through the project, Con Edison reduced intranet content from more than 1,200 pages to just 120 pages.
West Monroe and Con Edison designed Conor for employees, first and foremost. They relied on agile principles to design and deploy Conor and targeted four prime user personas to guide the development effort.
“Creating a modern, digital workplace is not just about technology. A vital first step in this process is developing a very thorough understanding of how employees work and how they work together. This guides thinking about how the new intranet solution could help create a more productive, connected, empowered, and engaged workforce,” said Kaumil Dalal, director in West Monroe’s Technology practice. “Another factor that contributed to the project’s success was Con Edison’s commitment to a comprehensive change management approach that targeted adoption and buy-in from the Corporate Affairs team and departmental content managers and authors, as well as employee users of the site.”
The project team developed Conor on the SharePoint platform, serving as a portal to other internal systems, various external services relevant to employees’ daily work, and other collaboration sites.
“Con Edison has embraced the fact that, in this industry at this time, like in other industries, winning in the marketplace starts with winning in the workplace,” said Paul A. DeCotis, senior director and leader of West Monroe’s East Coast Energy & Utilities team. “In our recent study, more than 60% of utility industry employees indicated their workplace technology needs at least some updating. Taking bold steps to modernize the workplace, as Con Edison has, not only strengthens operations today. It creates an environment that can attract the talent and emerging digital skills that utilities need for the future.”
Nielsen Norman Group chose the winning intranets through an expert review, based on design and usability, from an international field of dozens of submissions.
About West Monroe Partners
West Monroe is a national business and technology consulting firm that partners with dynamic organizations to reimagine, build, and operate their businesses at peak performance. Our team of more than 1,400 professionals is comprised of an uncommon blend of business consultants and deep technologists. This unique combination of expertise enables us to design, develop, implement, and run strategic business and technology solutions that yield a dramatic commercial impact on our clients’ profitability and performance. For more information, visit http://www.wmp.com.
About Consolidated Edison, Inc.
Consolidated Edison, Inc. is one of the nation’s largest investor-owned energy-delivery companies, with approximately $12 billion in annual revenues and $56 billion in assets. The company provides a wide range of energy-related products and services to its customers through the following subsidiaries: Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. (CECONY), a regulated utility providing electric, gas and steam service in New York City and Westchester County, New York; Orange and Rockland Utilities, Inc. (O&R), a regulated utility serving customers in a 1,300-square-mile-area in southeastern New York State and northern New Jersey; Con Edison Clean Energy Businesses, Inc., which through its subsidiaries develops, owns and operates renewable and energy infrastructure projects and provides energy-related products and services to wholesale and retail customers; and Con Edison Transmission, Inc., which through its subsidiaries invests in electric and natural gas transmission projects. For more information, visit https://www.conedison.com.
About Nielsen Norman Group
Nielsen Norman Group (http://www.nngroup.com) in an evidence-based user experience research, training and consulting firm that advises companies on how to improve the bottom line through human-centered design of products and services. NN/g principals Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini are world-renowned user experience experts who were advocating human-centered design and usability long before it became popular to do so. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, NN/g evaluates interfaces of all kinds and guides the critical design decisions that make websites, applications, intranets and products achieve their full potential for businesses and their users.