North American Construction Group

With over 50 years in the construction industry, North American Construction Group (NACG) provides heavy construction and piling and pipeline services to large oil, natural gas and resources companies across Canada. The firm employs 1,700 people in four divisions located throughout Canada. Supporting this distributed workforce is vital to the company's success.

Success also requires extensive administration and ongoing communication. When this family-owned business went public in 2006, NACG wanted to ensure employees still felt connected, despite impending growth.

Although NACG had an internal network drive to store company documents, there was no standard process to manage them, making it difficult for employees to find, use and share business information. "It was hard to keep track of the most recent version of any document, because it was always in so many different hands and often stored in multiple locations," says Pam Winters, NACG's CIO. "People were doubling workloads just trying to find the right document."

NACG enlisted the help of systems development firm iomer internet solutions inc. and implemented a portal solution that enabled the company to centralize documents and created a common interface and repository for company information. The central site acts as a launch pad for each department, where employees are able to locate their own data and access company updates or information without having to rifle through e-mails. What's more, the portal also allows the company to reach staff in a way it couldn't before: through an enterprise-wide blog hosted on the internal site.

"It's our CEO's way of personally talking to all the different employees within the company," Winters says. "It reinforces the company culture and the sense of family, which we were determined to keep even though we were going public."

NACG is just getting started. The organization is considering adding RSS feeds and wikis to the collaboration platform for improved employee interactivity. "We think working together will help employees feel that sense of coming together for a common purpose, which we've had since the beginning," Winters says. "Social networking gives us that flexibility."

PricewaterhouseCoopers

PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada provides industry-focused assurance, advisory and tax services for public, private and government clients. The firm and its related entities have more than 5,200 partners and staff, and offices in 24 locations throughout Canada.

The huge volume of diverse information PwC employees work with presented productivity challenges. Maneuvering through disconnected point solutions was confusing and time consuming for staff, who would often have to search through numerous large databases before finding the information they were looking for. Information for one client could reside within multiple data repositories, for example, requiring staff to search through all of them to get a complete client overview.

"We have over five thousand employees in Canada, but more than eight thousand databases and other repositories," says Steven Lugarini, IT director (Canadian business solutions), PwC. "The message we were receiving from staff was that we had the tools they needed to deliver value to clients, but the sheer volume was overwhelming and impacting productivity."

To overcome information overload and knowledge management challenges, PwC implemented a SharePoint portal platform in 2005, and over time it has added social networking capabilities, such as the ability to search for people in the organization by expertise or knowledge area.

Recently the firm surveyed users, and the new functionality seems to be a hit. "More than half of the partners and staff that we surveyed found the portal useful for finding people," says Gordon Vala-Webb, national director of knowledge management. "We've actually combined the search engine, the portal as a platform, and an application we call PeopleFind that includes a feed from our PeopleSoft system as well as other data that's coming from the business itself, along with the resume database."

The social networking aspects of PwC's portal have proven particularly useful considering how vast and deep the company's knowledge management matrix is. PwC has created an acronym dictionary and a "How Do I...?" application that help the firm's staff -- particularly new hires -- get up to speed. The applications resemble wikis in that they permit anyone to ask or provide an answer.

The acronym dictionary is noticeably helpful given that PwC professionals come across and use hundreds of acronyms every day. The "How Do I...?" is a collaborative FAQ regarding questions related to internal office services. Users can browse the questions and answers, leave a question, or answer one that a colleague has posted.

Elizabeth Caley is Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Canada, responsible for the business management and strategy of Microsoft Office Business Applications.