Ulrika MacGregor and Charlotte Sperling about "The Digital Workplace Journey of Stora Enso"

http://blog.enterprise-digital.net/files/MacGregor_and_Sperling.jpgAt i2 SUMMIT we are always inviting international speaker to discuss with us their insights on the digital transformation. In this post we like to introduce Ulrika MacGregor and Charlotte Sperling from Stora Enso with their answering our questions about their project and talk. Ulrika MacGregor is Digital Communications Manager, Stora Enso Loving what Digital Workplaces in general and SharePoint 2013 in particular can do for internal communications and collaboration. Having lived through (and survived!) the Digital Workplace implementation in Stora Enso, I am thoroughly enjoying seeing how this can make our everyday work a little bit easier. As part of Stora Enso’s Digital Communications team, my main responsibility is to manage the Digital Workplace from a communications- and usability perspective. Charlotte Sperling is Director New Technologies, Group IT, Stora Enso Passionate about everything online that makes business, work life and private matters smarter, cooler and more efficient. Working career revolves all around finding new ways through internet, digital workplaces and new technologies.

Ulrika and Charlotte – you will be speaking at the upcoming i2 SUMMIT in Zurich about the lessons learned from the project that you are running at Stora Enso. What are the three keywords that you could categorize your project and talk?

Complexity, simplicity, evolution

Could you give us a short introduction to what the project at Stora Enso is about?

Five years ago, we started our journey where we combined an old intranet and an exponentially growing collaboration platform, and added social features on top. It’s profiled according to your organisation, personalized based on your preferences and unique for each user based on their permission level. It’s amazingly complex, but equally hard for the users to understand which has led to a remake of the start page and navigation, moving towards a much more simplified concept and a better Search experience.

So would you say that your project is an enabler for a business transformation at Stora Enso?

Yes, one of many. The main usage of the Digital Workplace is carried out in sites which the employees can configure to support collaboration and their business processes.

What have been the key challenges in your project so far?

Understanding why the first version of the Digital Workplace did not fly as expected, and working continuously over several years trying to adjust the solution to better match the user expectations. On the technical side it’s trying to enable mobile access for all employees.

You work in IT and Communications respectively. How important would you say that your cooperation has been for this project?

We actually shared (equally) the Project Manager role in this project, which has been one of the success factors. Our organisations, and also us as individuals, often have different perspectives and prioritisations and during the project we have had countless discussions on the best way forward from a business point of view. Those discussions and the following decisions have always been made on equal terms. Also, running this jointly and keeping the business in focus has generated trust from the organisation.

If you look back at the project path – what would have you done differently if you would start today?

There are two things that we wish we had done, one is to include HR more in the process, as we see that this is one of the areas where a Digital Workplace really can deliver value for the end user. Also, we wish that we had not underestimated Change Management. It has taken us far more resources and time to fully roll out our Digital Workplace than we would have ever anticipated. And in fact, we are probably not even done yet.

What are the future plans for the project?

The project as such has already been delivered, now we are focussing on optimizing the service and the user experience. We are also trying to plan the role that our Digital Workplace will have in the future, given mega trends like the ongoing digitalization and new social tools enabled by suppliers like Microsoft.

What are your expectations for i2 SUMMIT?

We can see that there are many interesting companies represented in the i2 Summit, so we expect lots of new insights and interesting discussions with peers.