We launched our Intranet a couple of years ago and have been continually working on ensuring it’s content meets the needs of our employees, allowing them to self-serve and access information that helps them to serve the public better.
A modern collaborative intranet was a new thing for many of our employees and we knew that the “social” elements would take time to bed in. We are pleased with how they have been adopted so far with team rooms in-particular proving to be an effective place for teams to collaborate, share files and stay in touch.
We have recently expanded our forums outside of team rooms to help reduce the volume of force-wide emails.
We have already begun the next phase of our intranet journey focusing on solving user problems beyond simply access to good task-based content. This is an update on where we are on this journey.
Decision-making tool
Earlier this year, we built a decision-making tool for our website. This tool was designed to help easily guide the public through what is a complex set of possible options when reporting an incident on the road.
When a member of the public phones us, our call handlers ask a series of questions to determine the correct course of action. For example if you hit a certain type of animal (such as a dog) you need to report it to us, however, for different types of animal, such as a cat, you don’t need to.
Simply having content on a page with all the different possible scenarios would have been too much for the public to work through.
The decision-making tool replaces the human interaction with the operator and asks simple questions and responds based on the answers given. This guides the user to the correct endpoint, whether it be an online form or informing them they do not need to take any further action.
We are now rolling this tool out internally to operational officers.
The first use is to assist officers with decision making around the correct outcome for a range of offences due to a significant change in the process being rolled out, some examples include Criminal Damage, Malicious Communications, Possession of Drugs and Shoplifting.
The tool guides them through a series of questions such as “Did the suspect admit the offence?” and “What was the value of the goods damaged” (with simple multiple choice responses). Based on the responses the officer will be guided through to the recommended course of action based on the information entered.
This will be evolved as operational needs change.
This triage tool is embedded into the intranet and available on mobile devices.
We have already identified other areas where this tool will be useful for guiding users.
HR collaboration and process improvement
We worked closely with HR in the early stages of the intranet, but recently we ran a number of workshops to identify process improvement, enhanced self-service and digitisation opportunities. These will improve the experience of our applicants before they join the organisation as well as existing employees during their time here.
The outcomes of those workshops include:
- a proposed simpler recruitment process utilising digital tools where possible
- increased self-service content on our intranet for HR related queries
- internal forms to replace team mailboxes and complex Word-based forms
- integration opportunities with internal systems from our forms system
Internal forms
As mentioned briefly above, we are bringing the power of our successful in-house built forms system from the website to our intranet. This will still be hosted in the cloud, but now exists in a separate instance branded for our Intranet.
We have identified dozens of forms and demand for more is growing internally almost daily. We are prioritising their roll-out based on the biggest value and the number of users.
Once the forms are embedded we will have the opportunity to provide integration with internal systems where this will provide value.
Systems Integration Team
Finally, we need to mention our internal systems integration team. This team made up of a Product Owner and developers are delivering integration between enterprise applications to improve internal processes and increase data quality.