No one said it will be easy. Fear not: this comprehensive "how-to" workshop will provide the process and steps for redesigning an intranet, recommendations for securing funding, checklists for migrating to a new technology, or upgrading an existing platform (including SharePoint).

Attend this session and you'll come away with a clearer idea of how to create an intranet plan and governance policy, how to make a business case for an intranet or intranet redesign, basic design principles, and tips on how to best use SharePoint 2013.

This workshop will include hands-on planning and redesign exercises, and will feature an in-depth case study from Best Western International:

Best Western International, Inc., headquartered in Phoenix, Ariz., is a privately held hotel brand made up of more than 4,000 BEST WESTERN®, BEST WESTERN PLUS® and BEST WESTERN PREMIER® hotels in more than 100 countries and territories worldwide.

Best Western’s “member portal,” an intranet/extranet for the brand’s member hotels, is the company’s primary resource for sharing news, information and resources with its hoteliers. Last year Best Western successfully redesigned its member portal to improve user satisfaction and engagement with the site, using Adobe CQ5 as the platform. As part of the redesign process, the team examined and more clearly defined the strategic direction, goals, governance and content management processes for the site.

Cathy Krznarich, Manager, eCommerce, Best Western International, Inc.

In her role on Best Western’s digital marketing team, Cathy Krznarich oversees the strategic direction and daily operations for a number of the company’s marketing websites targeting specific audiences, including the company’s global hotel portal and corporate employee portal. Cathy has more than 15 years’ digital marketing experience, with a primary focus in the hospitality industry.

12:30pm

Lunch Break

(1 hour)

1:30pm

Workshop B - Intranet Activity Streams, Engagement and Internal Communications
Facilitator: Shel Holtz, Principal, Holtz Communications + Technology

Communicators in companies large and small are finding increased readership of their formal content when they move it from a magazine-like homepage format into the same activity stream employees use to ask questions and share information. Adopting an activity stream as the dominant feature of an intranet home page has other benefits not the least of which is raising the level of employee engagement. In this pre-conference workshop, Holtz will outline the role that communications plays in employee engagement and how activity streams accommodate most of the communication criteria for engaged employees.

Those who attend this session will learn what it takes to pivot away from email, how to create content to increase readership, and how to use an activity stream as a real-time employee monitoring system.

Shel Holtz

Holtz has written numerous books on social media. He counsels clients on the adoption of social and digital media and is a long-time blogger and co-host of the first and longest-running communication-focused podcast, For Immediate Release.

5:00pm

Networking Reception

(1 hour)

9:00am

Session A - Morning Keynote; The Intranet as the Center of Social Business

Speaker: Toby Ward, CEO, Prescient Digital Media, Conference Chair of Intranet Global Forum, IntranetBlog.com

The social business phenomenon has gathered significant momentum in recent years; many organizations are using social media inside, and out. More than 80 percent of medium-to-large organizations have implemented, or are testing, at least one intranet social media tool. However, investment and execution of internal social media lags far behind external social media efforts.

Toby Ward

Ward will compare and contrast the findings of this year's Social Business Study with the findings of least year's Social Intranet Study, examine some of the best practices, and highlight some of the leaders in creating and developing social workplaces. He'll cover what tools are being used in organizations of all sizes, and underscore the lessons learned from others who have implemented SharePoint and other social media initiatives.

9:45am

Session B - Case Study: Unisys: Overhauling Your Corporate Intranet

Speaker: Gloria Burke, Chief Knowledge Officer, Unisys

Unisys' unique and holistic approach to enterprise social business transformation led to a complete overhaul of its intranet, extranet environment and content federation with unisys.com in 2013. In this presentation, Gloria Burke, Chief Knowledge Officer, describes the strategy, framework and approaches that they developed for this transformation and shares a glimpse of the social networking platform and community-based collaborative ecosystem that is at the heart of this award winning, industry recognized implementation.

Gloria Burke

Gloria Burke is Chief Knowledge Officer of Unisys and is responsible for the development of the company's Enterprise Social Business Strategy and its supporting social culture adoption and employee engagement initiatives. In addition, she is responsible for the company's collaborative intranet and extranet environments as well as knowledge management practices and processes. She serves as chairperson of the company's Knowledge & Collaboration Stakeholders Council and Intranet Steering Committees.

Recently Gloria was named by Information Week Magazine as #2 of the Top Ten Social Business Leaders of 2013, and was also recognized in this list in 2012.

10:45am

Networking Break

(15 minutes)

11:00am

Session C - Case Study: Cisco Systems: Developing a Meaningful Social Intranet

Speakers: Sapna Garg, Senior Manager, Intranet & Social Collaboration Information Technology, Cisco Systems Inc. and Heather Gallegos, Sr. Mgr, Internal Communications Channels, Global Corporate Communications Cisco Systems Inc.

The answer to any question by any Cisco employee is "check the website." Cisco Systems has gone to great lengths to web-enable almost all work-related information and nearly every single work function on its corporate intranet. The effort has translated into an annual return on investment of more than US$800 million.

What are the winning characteristics of successful corporate intranets such as Cisco's? Learn the five winning characteristics of leading intranets that will help drive intranet success. During this session, John Allen and Heather Gallegos reveal the inner workings of the acclaimed intranet at Cisco.

Sapna Garg

Sapna Garg brings over 20 years of experience in IT applications, infrastructure and user experience to her position leading the IT strategy and execution for Cisco’s Intranet & Social Collaboration service. In this capacity she leads a team of IT professionals and partners with business teams across Cisco to drive transformational improvements to Cisco employee’s digital experience. Previously, Sapna has held several IT Management roles in Cisco, HP, Procter & Gamble & Tata Consulting Services around the world in India, Singapore & US.

Sapna holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from MITS, India and a Master in Business Administration degree from Indian Institute of Management. .

She is a member of Project Cornerstone and volunteers for Junior Achievement in Saratoga Union School District. Born and brought up in India, Sapna now calls California home. Sapna is bilingual in Hindi and English and lives with her family in the Bay Area.

Heather Gallegos

Heather Gallegos brings over 15 years experience in marketing, operations and communications to her position leading the strategy and management for Cisco’s internal communication channels. In this capacity she leads the cross-functional Internal Digital Working Group, tasked with aligning global business and IT initiatives to improve Cisco’s employee digital experience.

Previously, Heather held several management roles in communications and marketing at Cisco. Heather holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management from California State University at Fresno and a Master in Business Administration degree from Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business.

She is a member of IABC and the San Jose Unified School District’s Marketing and Communications Advisory Committee. A California native, Heather is bilingual in Spanish and lives with her family in San Jose.

12:00pm

Networking Lunch

(1 hour)

1:00pm

Session D – Trends and Opportunities in Developing a Social Intranet

Panelists: Caroline Leach, Vice President, Communications DIRECTV, John Cloyd, President and CEO, JCS Consulting Group Inc., Toby Ward, CEO, Prescient Digital Media, Conference Chair of Intranet Global Forum, IntranetBlog.com, Shelt Holtz, Principal, Holtz Communications + Techology

During this session, a panel of intranet experts will interact with you and discuss the newest trends and opportunities to develop, implement and measure your intranet.

Caroline Leach

Caroline Leach leads workplace and culture transformation at DIRECTV, one of the world’s leading providers of digital television entertainment. She is vice president of Communications on the Human Resources leadership team.

Major change initiatives include a customer experience transformation to win customer loyalty for life, a connected enterprise strategy to drive social collaboration, and the renovation of a new headquarters campus to enable new ways of working.

To entertain the future, her 40-person team led the creation of the DIRECTV employer brand. She leads employee communications, HR communications, employee recognition, corporate events, trade shows, corporate citizenship, and diversity and inclusion. She has also managed executive communications and sales communications.

Leach has a master's degree in communication management from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She is working with the Center for Effective Organizations at the USC Marshall School of Business on a project addressing social media for innovation.

She served the International Association of Business Communicators as an executive board member, district director and chapter president. At the 2013 IABC World Conference, she was a general session speaker on social media.

John Cloyd

John brings over 25 years of leadership, vision and strategy in high technology and systems.

Before founding JCS Consulting, John was the CIO at Vistage International, an exclusive membership organization focused on helping senior business executives become better leaders, solve their business problems, and achieve better results. John led the technology team for this 16,000 member organization as they created and launched the highly successful private social network known as “Vistage Village”. The Village is a safe haven used by thousands of CEOs and senior business executives every month for private and secure communication and networking. Additionally, John and his team crafted and deployed a suite of technologies linking the company’s website, email marketing, Salesforce.com automation, and business intelligence that enabled dramatic advances in membership growth.

Previously, John worked for SpaceDev (now part of Sierra Nevada Corporation) on the Dreamchaser program and was responsible for Information Technology, Industrial Security, and Legal Affairs. He also negotiated acquisitions and sales contracts of rocket and satellite technology. John has worked in small to mid-sized companies as well as Fortune 500 employers in both the hardware and software industries and brings a broad spectrum of business experience to JCS. His expertise includes business unit management at the P & L level, mergers & acquisitions, and business strategy and execution.

John received his MBA from UCLA and an undergraduate degree in Information Systems from San Diego State University.

2:00pm

Session E – Case Study: Middleburg Bank: Building a Social SharePoint Intranet

Speaker: Marybeth Muir, Senior Vice President, Strategic Planning, Middleburg Bank

Middleburg Bank (established 1924) is a full-service commercial bank in Virginia. Over the past ten years, Middleburg has grown to include 13 financial service centers, an operation center, and over US$1.2 billion in assets. With the company's recent expansion, it became evident that their existing information system was not adequately supporting their growth strategy. Senior management made a decision to incur the expense and implement a new intranet system using SharePoint 2013. Learn how Middleburg planned, designed, and built a brand new intranet from scratch, and in the process quickly migrated more than a half million files and added social media to the new SharePoint 2013 environment.

Marybeth Muir

Marybeth Muir leads strategic planning for Middleburg Financial Corporation, including the development of new business and organizational processes. Additionally, she oversees the process improvement initiative, marketing and business intelligence. Marybeth has been Senior Vice President of Middleburg Bank of process improvement since August 2012 with her expanded role added in November 2013. Prior to her current role, she was VP of Marketing at Middleburg Bank, and SVP, Branding and Communications at Bank of America.

3:00pm

Networking Break (15 minutes)

3:15pm

Session F – Communication Teams and IT…So Happy Together: How to Work with IT to Create the Intranet of Your Dreams

Speaker: Rob Colwill, CEO and Founder, Coldwater Software

Strategic business initiatives are critically important to the health and growth of enterprises. C-level executives are often charged with developing critical business objectives and measures while business leaders and managers within the company are required to drive the strategic initiatives forward with limited information and tight timelines. IT is often included as an afterthought and asked to support the initiatives in short time frames with limited budgets. This session will discuss how communication professionals, IT professionals and business analysts can work together in order to use SharePoint and web-based services as the internal technology platform for driving strategic initiatives. By working together, these critical teams can bring the skill sets required to create a comprehensive framework for the evaluation of social, mobile, desktop and web-based services that enable scalable, cost-effective and powerful initiatives across the strategic life cycle.

Key Takeaways:

• Attendees will leave the session knowing what questions to ask IT to properly enable your strategic initiatives.
• How to speed up your project by using a comprehensive technology selection framework.
• Understanding how to ensure internal alignment by involving IT to evaluate cloud based tools and services.
• Best practices on working with IT to reach remote employees and employees on mobile devices.

Rob Colwill

Colwill has 13 years of experience in information technology, specializing in defining and managing complex software features and initiatives. Colwill has a passion for innovation and seeks to consistently refine scope and deliver on the vision. As the Global Portal Manager at Newmont Mining, Colwill delivered a global portal upgrade with custom branding, business solutions, taxonomy and search. As a senior program manager at Microsoft, Colwill developed deep experience in all aspects of the software development life cycle, including enterprise software, large-scale web services, productivity and database applications. Colwill's project design and management experience includes work on a variety of world-class products including SQL Server, Office, and Windows Live. Colwill has defined and led research projects, UI design projects, architecture projects, standards projects, and more.

4:00pm

Session G: Afternoon Keynote: Internal Social Visual Communications

Speaker: Shel Holtz, Principal, Holtz Communications + Technology

Image-driven communication is becoming a standard component of most communicators' plans. A confluence of trends have driven images to a new level, led by the adoption of mobile devices as a primary means of consuming content. The rise of Instagram and the role Facebook, Tumblr and other social networks play in the sharing of images suggests that photos have taken on a new role. Rather than simply chronicling a moment for posterity, they are a means of communication of what we're up to right now. Brands have carried the idea of images-as-communication to another level, with 40% of shared images on Instagram coming from marketing efforts. Despite evidence of the widespread adoption of image-based communication, the practice has not yet found its way into internal communications. You can be a step ahead of that trend!

In this session, Shel Holtz will help you:

• Understand the new and emerging role of images in modern communication.
• Develop an image strategy that supports your internal communication goals.
• Use infographics and info-posters to tell stories.
• Take advantage of Instagram's private account features.

Shel Holtz

Shel Holtz has written numerous books on social media. He counsels clients on the adoption and use of social and digital media and is a long-time blogger and co-host of the first and longest-running communication-focused podcast, For Immediate Release.

Conference Hotel

Radisson at USC, Los Angeles

3450 S. Figueroa St.

Los Angeles, CA 90007

1 (866) 299-2910

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