Gold winner: SunGard (NZ/USA)
Categorised under: Intranets, intranet innovation awards
Sungard's Skills Matrix dispenses with a wall-sized spreadsheet and allows managers and other staff to find the right employee for a task. Image provided courtesy of Sungard
Post 6 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.
SunGard is a major provider for financial systems and applications.
With a major change in organisational structure came a comparable change in the way the skills were managed. The existing system, a spreadsheet, quickly became unusable, and grew to over 90 spreadsheet pages.
In response, the intranet team created the online Skills Matrix. Built with usability in mind, and what might be deemed a ‘web 2.0 ethic’ of user ratings, open sourcing the data and more, this is a benchmark example of a skill-finding application.
Additional benefits to the organisation are:
- Experts are visible to all staff.
- Succession planning and risk mitigation for critical skills and key staff became possible.
- Staff training can be planned strategically.
Immediate staff benefits are less dramatic, but because of low staff turnover, these benefits increase with time:
- Staff can track skill development over time aiding professional development.
- Staff can improve their skill levels by approaching other staff they know have the skills.
- Staff are able to see what training would most benefit them.
The Skills Matrix tool is innovative because of the way it matched the business benefit with appropriate technologies and existing constraints, delivering value from day one. This built momentum and provided the ability to carry out later phases, delivering value initially out of scope. These benefits included improvements to the reporting engine and the ability to report on staff skills changes over time.
(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 