1. Coxone
The Social Intranet Journey: Building an Award-winning Intranet from the Ground Up
I’m not going to do the “who Cox is slide” but let me just give you a quick “who we are…”
Cox Communications – Cable and broadband division of Cox Enterprises (121 year old company)
3rd largest cable company in America – largest privately held
Over 6M residential and business customers that use our services
Social / Collaboration meaning for Cox – being such an old company, social meant getting together for drinks, not collaborating online.
So before I get into it…
How many people here are in the early stages of trying to redo their intranet?
In the middle of building?
Are almost there?

2. Why did we do it… How did we get there…
Home Page: What you don’t see is the never ending news scroll
We really wanted Search to be in the forefront of everything – and that was a behavioral change for everyone. I’ll get a bit more into that in a minute…
HR: The HR experience was pretty labor intensive to find things – a lot going on
Now, it’s simple and easy to find the key items that you want quickly and easily.
What you don’t see is the targeted quick links and the Incentive Comp webpart.
Click - Why did we do it… there’s a lot of reasons…
Ease of use and simplicity! It’s all about productivity…
Get in, find what you want, and get out…
Or, work on your document right in the system and collaborate with your team.
Why did we do it… How did we get there…

3. Why embark on this journey
OLD INTRANET
NEW INTRANET
Functionality and User Experience
Search was horrible
Mobility was non-existent
Difficult to navigate
Hard to post, update and manage
Platform no longer supported
Strategic Alignment
Didn’t meet the company’s needs as we transformed the business
Couldn’t deliver from a productivity and collaboration perspective
Lack of integration with our future state roadmap (tech & tools)
Did not align with our employee engagement strategy (today’s employees)
What were we trying to overcome with this change?
Search – Contour story – we had over 200k documents on our intranet! 98% didn’t migrate over.
Mobility – Chrome story
Navigation – moving the cursor
Posting – RT Editor – text sizing and images
Platform – Oracle WCI 2004
Touch on transformation and how we needed to align with the business direction.
Click – go through each bullet with CoxOne
Search – in the forefront and we work really hard to make it effective (new employee story)
Strategic Alignment – we are a Microsoft shop! So from a digital workplace perspective, O365 is what we do!
Transformed the business – going to COEs across the country – all take calls from everywhere – needed to all be on the same page

4. The journey begins… It started with 6 months of research.
To do this… Tracking down, finding and working with key technology partners and functional stakeholders.
Using some of their resources and gathering key financial information (current platform costs, support, etc.) along with employee interviews and data.
I crafted a 45 page presentation outlining the need and purpose of implementing a new intranet.
It combined the desired needs from employees (Search, easy access, mobile, HR information) with…
Financial benefits, current platform issues, and the company’s strategic priorities.
I laid out the story to go and get buy-in.
For another 6 months, I went and presented to anyone that would listen to me at the VP level. I would ask for 30 minutes and sit in their office and walk through the key points and tell them that I just wanted them to be aware that I am looking to create a new intranet.
Then came the test…

5. Senior Executive buy-in and Sponsorship
From this point I went and presented to each of our SVPs and EVPs with my intention to rebuild our intranet. Creating the one-pager from my 45 page presentation was not easy, but got all relevant information into one document for executives to look at.
Some key point to consider when doing this:
Senior Execs don’t have a lot of time – so the one-pager gets it all into 1 easy and digestible format
(I had several different versions – technology, functional, operational)
Frame the benefits to your intended audience
Do your homework to find out what each executive needs from the new system
How will it benefit the organization – their function and/or department
Get your elevator speech perfected – you will use it a lot!
It’s all about your influence
You must be seen as the expert in this area – immerse yourself in the data that tells your story for the change – data talks
I had numbers from productivity cost savings, server costs of old system, software support costs of the old system, security issue numbers, search data
Create a chart of who you need buy-in from (strategy mapping) and plan accordingly – COE story…west coast/east coast
Leadership saw the value that I was trying to create. Even though we are very risk averse!
This is the key to getting the funding and keep getting funding for future phases. This piece never ends!
The power of the one-pager!

6. Developing a social intranet
WHAT DOES SOCIAL MEAN FOR YOUR COMPANY
Two-way feedback
All-employee content creation
Easy access to subject matter experts
Increased productivity
Knowledge and file sharing
Online and virtual thinktanks
The list goes on and on…
What does social mean to you!
We now allow employees to post items on their social networks – something pretty new
But from an internal perspective – what are you trying to accomplish?
We were really looking to create the two-way feedback loop. That was the big piece that was missing.
We were also looking to increase online collaboration with O365 which is integrated into the system.
Using Office online for editing together
Tring to decrease repetition and duplication of work
We are a very based company – files all over the place…
You must understand what your social implementation is going to solve for and determine the early adopters

7. Cox’s internal social approach
CUSTOM SHAREPOINT SOCIAL
YAMMER SOCIAL
Go into how we are using our social channels…
SP Social is more of a comms tool to reinforce a message – but also as an engagement tool
And Yammer is more of the social platform for interests and more fun stuff
So we integrate both into our communities depending on what the owner is looking to accomplish

8. EXECUTIVE ENGAGEMENT IS A KEY FACTOR IN ADOPTION!
social Engagement
EXECUTIVE ENGAGEMENT IS A KEY FACTOR IN ADOPTION!
Touch on employee engagement – been great!
We’ve really seen an increase over time with our executives.
We have to teach executives to be engaged
Understanding the impact they have is essential
Some get it, and others don’t – I still present to leaders on how to use the system to engage.
I just recently did a presentation to one of our SVPs
They were overthinking it! What do I write?
And, it’s a social intranet, so they need to add their photos to their profile!
It’s a behavior, and we’ve been working hard to change the “old school” culture to the modern day!
Collaboration is a behavior… not a technology!

9. Relationships & partnerships
CONTENT
FUNCTIONALITY
Build relationships with business partners
Establish your content strategy
Share your vision and strategy
Provide tools and templates
Make it fun and easy!
Build relationships with stakeholders
Establish your governance
Share your strategic roadmap
Get continuous stakeholder feedback
Don’t kill each other!
Building relationships and partnerships is essential on the business side and the technology side.
Business side – creating a content partnership to engage employees
Tweaking national content into local content
Taking content and making specific to departments
Talk about cross promoting in communities and sharing – give some examples (YouTube / Netflix)
Just started letting employees share on personal social networks
Tech side – partnering on the roadmap – benefits you both
Give them insight into where you want to go
Allows them to give input into functionality
Search and how both sides work together to make search better (business and technology)
Click – keeping Leadership in the loop!
ALWAYS KEEP SENIOR LEADERSHIP ENGAGED AND IN THE LOOP!

10. CoxOne home page
Modern look and feel with endless scroll. User friendly design to search, manage, share, and update content easily.

11. CoxOne home page
Below the fold – part of Information scroll.
Web-style content delivery. A roll-up of all content from groups and communities that you are a member of or following.
Providing a weekend experience during the week. Just like a standard news website.

12. Entry to your O365 digital workplace
The entry point to everything at Cox Communications. From O365 to HR to all proprietary applications. Our intranet is the starting point!
Homepage is the launch point for everything at Cox
Not only to Office 365, but all Cox proprietary application and information

13. My hr dashboard
A customized HR dashboard tailored to the individual employee with their personized information.

14. CCI – Public Affairs – Digital Communications – Chris Harrer
The news feed
Employees get company, product, regional, and community news rolled up in a personalized news feed. You’re in control of your content.
CCI – Public Affairs – Digital Communications – Chris Harrer

15. Company “sites”
Departments, divisions, and regions publish news and documents for their specific audience.

16. Communities
Team engagement, two-way communications, document collaboration and task assignments within a department, team or group.

17. Company & Community Site “Pages”
Webpage architecture built into each company and community. Sites can default to Home or Pages based on site owner’s needs.

18. Resources
Employees get one-click access to all the tools & applications they need. Choose what tools you use most and have them available instantly.

19. marketplace
Our new employee marketplace where you can buy and sell items in an employee only safe environment – locally or nationally
Excited to launch our new marketplace.

20. HOW DO YOU KEEP THE INNOVATION GOING?
YOUR INTRANET LAUNCH ISN’T THE END…
IT’S THE BEGINNING!
ANALYTICS
The launch of your intranet is just the beginning!
It’s a journey, and there will be good times and rough times!
Celebrate your wins and learn from your mistakes… and never stop!
It’s all a part of creating an engaged, informed and connected organization!
Click - But how do you keep the funding and the innovations going? ANALYTICS!
Like I said in the beginning, leadership likes data, facts and numbers – use the data to influence, improve and enhance. Example: 1) in 2018 – Resources not in search and 5k searches a month for them – by changing we created $600k in productivity and time savings. 2) in 2019 we noticed HR Tools usage was immense, 3.2M clicks a year – by changing main nav - $2.7M in productivity and time savings
HOW DO YOU KEEP THE INNOVATION GOING?

21. Analytics
A Focus on User Engagement.
Engaging users with the right content is a major focus of modern-day intranets. CoxOne has an engagement analytics engine.

22. Adobe Analytics
Tracking employee pathing and everything else a modern web-based analytics package provides.

23. Adobe Analytics
Tracking our ‘Featured News’ section to let us know if and when to change our featured news articles.

24. Adobe Analytics
A site by site analysis of news article content consumption.
Make sure they know what ‘sites’ are – sections!

25. Adobe Analytics
A site by site analysis of overall news article content consumption and read time.
This allows us to see what’s resonating with employees and what’s not.

26. THE INTRANET JOURNEY NEVER ENDS…
If you prepare and research properly, you can have such a huge impact on your company and employees.
Most people in the company don’t realize how important their intranet is, until it goes down or disappears.
Thank you!
…AND IT CAN BE AN CRAZY RIDE!