Gold winner: COWI (Denmark)
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, intranet innovation awards
COWI's project sites have enabled faster and more effective working across teams and departments, while maintaining compliance with the organisation's strict methodology.
Post 9 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.
COWI is a leading international consulting group, working worldwide within engineering, environmental science and economics.
The COWI Business Collaboration Portal (BCP) has been designed to meet the requirements of employees scattered in locations such as Denmark, Belgium, Turkey, and the Arabian Gulf.
At heart a Microsoft SharePoint installation and located within the main COWIPortal, the BCP has been heavily developed and customised to match the requirements of COWI project managers (PMs). It enables them to work on projects with colleagues from across the entire Group, and share documents, news and task and issue lists with external partners and customers.
Prior to the BCP rollout, PMs and other COWI employees used to work on projects on file drives placed physically in their own countries, with no access to file drives in other parts of the COWI Group. Interaction and collaboration usually only happened when employees were brought together by their managers on projects.
When employees from COWI Denmark worked on projects with participants from different companies in the COWI Group, all the files were sent by mail or uploaded to the old extranet. The original files, however, were kept on the project file drive in Denmark according to the quality assurance policies. A lot of time was wasted on checking which version of a document was the most recent and whether everybody had the latest version.
Now, employees can work together on project sites in the portal and they can publish news, events, tasks and questions to anyone and everyone.
COWI won an award for providing a customised, process-compliant solution that takes the ‘Team Sites’ concept to the next level of sophistication.
For full details of this Award-winning entry, obtain a copy of the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 