Western Union The Wire Intranet

BUS-S06
Delivering an Excellent Intranet with
WebSphere Portal:
A Western Union Success Story

Donna Skoog | IT Manager, Corporate Systems | Western Union
Glenn Kline | Technical Director | Perficient, Inc

Smarter software for a
Smarter Planet. © IBM Corporation 2011
© IBM Corporation 2011

IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference 2011 - Americas

Agenda

• Western Union Background
• History of The Wire and Future Vision
• Implementing the Vision
• The IBM Solution
• Challenge the Project Faced
• The Road to Production
• Lessons Learned
• Future Innovations

2


Western Union Background
• Worldwide leader in global money-transfer
services
– Founded in 1851
– Publically traded on the NYSE under WU
– Affiliated with Orlandi Valuta and Vigo
• Provides a wide range of global financial services
– Customers conveniently send money fast and reliably
– Pay bills
– Purchase money orders
• Breadth of company
– 6,700 + employees worldwide, headquartered in
Englewood, CO
– 445,000 agent locations worldwide
– Agents in 200 countries and territories
3


History of The Wire

• October 2006 Western Union was spun off from
parent, First Data Corporation
• Pre Spin
– Employees could access news and information via FDC’s
FirstWeb
– Had to migrate all relevant existing and new content to
Western Union post spin
• Launched a new Intranet called The Wire as part
of the spin off
– Focused on internal communication
– Had to make sure critical applications and content were
available day one
– Available to over 5,000 employees worldwide

4


History of The Wire, Part 2

August 2007 employee study showed confirmed key needs
• Make search more relevant and easier to use
• Organize information in less-confusing categories for quick access to
tools and content
• Create an easy-to-use and self-managed Employee Directory that
makes finding physical addresses and fellow international employees
easier
• Personalize the experience specific to my language and locale
• Provide more content on Business in my department and region
• Tell me about the company vision and strategy
• Allow me to write news and feature stories for my region or
department in my language

5


WU’s Vision
A personalized portal that address employee needs

• Interactivity that fosters employee engagement
• Knowledge Sharing
• Streamlined and simplified internal communications
• Increase relevance through personalization
• Expansion of content contribution

6


Vision to Reality

• Interactivity that fosters employee engagement
– Provide areas of the site that are controlled by each user
– Integrate external applications for single point of entry
• Knowledge Sharing
– Provide areas of the site where employees could
interactively share knowledge and information
– Provide areas of the site where employees could connect
with other employees

7


Vision to Reality

• Streamlined and simplified internal communications
– Simplify the Information Architecture
– Improve search for the site and individual areas such as
policies and procedures
• Increased relevance through personalization
– Create areas of user specific
– Allow user ability to personalize areas of the site

8


Vision to Reality

• Expansion of content contribution
– Expand content contribution to more
individuals
– Provide a forum for all employees to
contribute individual and group content

9


The IBM Solution

• Key IBM technologies are instrumental to the solution

WebSphere Portal Lotus Connections OmniFind 8.5
6.1 2.5

10


WebSphere Portal 6.1

• Portal is the key integration point for an excellent work experience
• Many of portal’s features are leveraged for The Wire
– Themes and skins for customized user interface
– Role based security
– Personalization
– Custom portlets
– Leverages portal APIs
– SSO
– Search integration
– Web Application Integrator
– Pages, URL Mappings, custom unique names, etc
• Out of box capabilities saved many, many months of development

11


Lotus Connections 2.5

• Currently upgrading to 3.0

• Leverages the following
– Profiles
– Communities
– Wikis
– Blogs
– Bookmarks

• A deeper dive into Connections will come later

12


OmniFind 8.5

• Integrated into header for seamless and easy search
experience

• Integrated portlets simplify advanced search capabilities

• Crawlers index all portal content

• Content filter service performs the following
– Caches results for maximum performance
– Matches content tags with user profile attributes for personalized results

13


The Wire Today

The Portal
• Through the use of WebSphere Portal we were able to meet the
need to provide a personalized interactive experience
• Seamless integration of external applications through the use of
pre-built portlets allows us to provide external functionality
without leaving the site.

14


The Wire Today

Portal Screen Walkthrough

15


The Wire Today

Omnifind Search
• Through the use of Omnifind we were able to implement a more
robust search.
• Advanced search functionality allows users to find information
quicker and easier.

16


Search Screen Walkthrough


The Wire Today

Site Usage: Legacy vs. New
(Nov 2009 to Nov 2010)

• The new Wire site receives 3% more unique
visitor traffic and 13% more repeat visitor
traffic indicating more reliance on the
wire as an information source.
• Total page views is down 25% indicating
people are finding what they are looking
for in less time and with less clicks.
• Employees are not leaving the site as quickly
as they use to as indicated with a -7%
abandonment rate and a 4.3% increase of
time between one and five minutes.

18


The Wire Today

Lotus Connections
• Through the use of Lotus Connections we were able to provide a
more robust employee directory using Profiles.
• The introduction of blogs, wikis and communities provide an area
for individual users to contribute information and share
knowledge with other employees interactively.

19


Lotus Connections Screen Walkthrough


Social Software – Lotus Connections

Employee Usage change between January and
April 2011
• The use of Profiles has increased
• Number of Employees updating profile
increased 28%
• Number of Employees adding photo
increased 20%
• The use of Blogs increased
• Number of published Blogs increased
24%
• Number of Bloggers increased 28%

21


Personalization

• Customization, Personalization, and Security
– Customization is allowing an end user to tailor their experience
– Personalization is presenting content and applications based on attributes about the user
– Security is blocking or allowing content or applications based on role

• Personalization is not just about attributes in LDAP
– Can personalize against any Java accessible repository
– Visibility rules can conditionally show or hide pages and/or portlets

• Western Union relies heavily on personalization
– Key attributes are exported from PeopleSoft to a data warehouse
– Attributes in the warehouse drive both personalization in portal and profiles in Lotus Connections
– Personalization rules can be written to select content whose tags match these user attributes
– Visibility rules can conditionally show/hide portlets based on these attributes

22


Personalization – Solving the Content Preview Challenge

• Portlet allows authors to “inject” attribute values
• Simulates any combination of personalization tags

23


Architecture Single Sign On to Lotus
Connections using LTPA

Content service
caches web content

Omniture Web Analytics

Personalized and customizable
experience for users.
• SSO to portal and Connections
• Integrated search
• Customizable portlets
• Solid performance
•Business manages content
• Single Sign On with
Integrated search the desktop using
SPNEGO
with OmniFind daily
PeopleSoft
extract to data
warehouse feeds
Connections and
Portal
personalization.

24


Project approach
Development Re-aligned Health Check Launch User
Iterations project After months of Soft launch in 3 Experience
3 - 2 week Agile project work, paused to months, hard New refreshed UI to
development sprints approach with evaluate technical launch 4 weeks launch with new CEO
smaller team implementation later taking the reigns
including business

25


Lessons Learned

• Use an agile project approach
– Development building everything in a vacuum yields no results
– Agile approach keeps development leads in touch with business
• Architecture
– Must have architectural and design reviews by someone who really knows portal
– Periodic reviews with development
– If you take your really good WebSphere Administrator and just say learn portal with no help, they
will struggle for a bit
• Performance Testing
– Start early
– Allocate time in the schedule for tuning, code enhancements, etc
• Decided to make project changes
– Smaller team of highly skilled portal resources
– Worked side by side with business
– Agile approach
– Integrated user experience

26


Portal is the Tool Box

• The tool box contains an almost
overwhelming amount of tools
• You still need to know what’s in the box
• You must know what the tools are used for
• And, determine when you should use one
• If you don’t know how to use a tool, get a
mechanic who does
• And lastly, don’t use a tool for the wrong
purpose!

27


What is in store for the future

• Lotus Connections upgrade to 3.0 is underway
– Expanded Profiles capabilities (Network contacts, do you know, directory)
– Community extensions (sub-communities, invitations, forums)
– Scalability (Existing install was not clustered)
– Social analytics(Did you know, things in common)
• Portal 7 upgrade is on the horizon
– Easier administration and release management
– Better web 2.0 support
– Tagging and rating
– Major upgrades to WCM…
• Currently working on a business case to migrate from TeamSite to WCM
• Deeper application integration
• The Wire Mobile Version

28


Thank You

Donna Skoog
Donna.Skoog@WesternUnion.com

Glenn Kline
Glenn.Kline@Perficient.com

Session coming up next…
Tech-B21 You Did What? Avoid the Unacceptable and Make it Exceptional!

29


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