Vision Australia has selected technology consultancy Squiz to revitalise its intranet system. Squiz’s solution integrated the latest accessibility technology and design to drive collaboration and enable more effective customer service to be delivered by Vision Australia’s 700 employees, approximately 15 per cent of which have visual impairment.

Vision Australia sought to replace its intranet, developed almost a decade ago, with one which not only engaged all users through intuition, social functions, and ease of use, but also met the extensive accessibility requirements to service its employees.

The previous intranet did not address the issue of accessibility in a way that made the design functional or encouraged engagement.

The organisation had also come to rely heavily on email as an alternative, which slowed its processes down. Overall, information and knowledge between teams had become siloed, and it was difficult to break out of existing processes due to the complex accessibility required of its technology and information systems.

“Vision Australia had very specific requirements that did not simply call for an ‘out the box’ service,” says John-Paul Syriatowicz, Group CEO of Squiz (pictured).

“We needed to find a solution whereby employees could share knowledge in real-time with relevant team members, as well as integrate the social functionality that we have come to expect from our professional intranets, including posts, tagging, and video and photo sharing.”

Squiz built the intranet and its unique functions from the ground-up to meet the requirements of the system in terms of accessibility.

It was essential the intranet was functional to all users across a range of devices and encouraged increased collaboration both professionally and socially.

In order to increase productivity and encourage users, the end product was designed to be an efficient and attractive information repository which decreased reliance on email and promoted knowledge sharing. Sharing could be conducted between peers, across teams, or company-wide, according to relevance to the end user.

Single sign-on across multiple platforms gave users the confidence to switch between applications and devices as needed.

Most importantly, staff in the field were able to send information, questions, documents, images and more for immediate response from others in the company in order to resolve client issues faster. Effectively, the new intranet became a cross between a social network and a knowledge center for staff, who could tap into this resource as and when needed.

“We are thrilled with the end result,” said Ron Hooton, CEO of Vision Australia.

“Squiz’s system was so intuitive and so familiar that those who use consumer websites and known social media platforms required little to no training at all.

“Within the first two weeks, 20 user groups were created, including professional information exchanges and even footy tipping competitions.”

Squiz is currently working on the next round of improvements to an already agile intranet for Vision Australia, including a user dashboard enabling users to have a quick overview of everything relevant to them in one place.