Services Australia revamps intranet as internal info access fragments

Services Australia is looking to relaunch its M365 SharePoint-based intranet in mid-July, hoping to re-establish it as “the main source of truth” for operational information in the agency.

The intranet redesign had completed alpha testing with users as of last month and was progressing into a beta phase.

The key goal of the redesign is to make the intranet more personalised and targeted to specific user cohorts.

Director of executive communication and events Jillian Harding told the SharePoint Intranet Festival, run by Swoop Analytics and Microsoft, late last month that internal research showed the intranet was competing with other platforms internally, including Viva Engage, an enterprise social networking service that Microsoft makes.

“Communications research last year showed us that there are system-wide challenges with our internal communication system, including duplication of information and information overload,” Harding said. 

“As a result, staff are telling us that they’re overwhelmed with information from a variety of sources.

“We want the intranet to be the main source of truth but it [presently] competes with the other business teams. The other business teams have been spinning up SharePoint sites because they can. They also have locally collated newsletters [and] use Viva Engage extensively. 

“And of course, there are other resources that they use as well.”

Harding said she is confident the intranet redesign “will stop the perceived need for local curation of information” in various parts of the organisation.

“We are now able to technically personalise parts of the homepage and apply targeting to news -I know we’re a little bit behind the eight ball, but we’re getting there,” she said.

“We’re [also] going to provide a facility for our business areas to be able to publish to the homepage and target their people.”

Intranet project assistant director Michael Papacharalambous emphasised the careful approach being taken with the refresh.

“We aren’t rushing headlong to the solutions we think will work,” he said.

A number of different redesign elements were alpha-tested with staff.

There is a particular emphasis on meeting the needs of the agency’s service delivery staff – the 20,000 or so staff who “are serving Australians all day, every day.”

“They often have multiple programs open to serve customers, and we noticed they reduced the intranet to fit a number of programs on their screen,” Papacharalambous said.

Feedback from the alpha testing was “confusing, extraordinary, frank, but immensely useful,” Papacharalambous added.

“There’s different feedback that we received per cohort, but we understand that service delivery staff need preferential treatment so they can serve our customers,” he said.

“There were many discussions about where different elements should be on the homepage, with no clear consensus. 

“Ultimately, the focus groups found that the intranet homepage will meet the needs of staff so long as they can easily find the links they need every day, easily see what’s changed or what’s new that affects them, and have clear cues to get them to the part of the page that they need.”

While there is a preference to use out-of-the-box capabilities in the M365 platform, Papacharalambous noted that some custom work may be required to address specific user concerns.

“There are Microsoft constraints, such as the defined space in the SharePoint templates between headings and around things [that] people [see as] wasted space, but the out-of-the-box solution may not allow us to change that,” he said.

Papacharalambous said the aim was to beta test “with a larger cohort of users over a few weeks in June”.

“All being well, we’ll aim to launch around mid-July,” he said, although he added that the timing could be adjusted due to end-of-financial-year workload.

“There’s a lot of work for service delivery staff at the end and beginning of the financial year, and we can’t drop a new thing into that workload,” he said.

“We’re always finding there’s never quite an ideal time to do a release, but at least within our agency, we understand the peaks and troughs that impact customer service delivery.”

Papacharalambous noted that Microsoft Copilot could create additional improvements for the intranet in future.

“We’re waiting on Services Australia to endorse Copilot for use in the agency, so this will improve searchability and surfacing of information for the intranet,” he said.

The agency is also hoping for technical changes to M365 by Microsoft.

“Longer term, we’re hoping that Microsoft will introduce a better calendar app for SharePoint and the capability for dark mode, which was quite a significant piece of feedback coming from our neurodiverse and staff with disability cohorts as well.”