Crunch time at ARN

31 March 2011

There have been two projects that I have been working on at ARN.

First one is the marketing one, that I have talked about earlier, in which I am assisting Jodie Koning (National Marketing Director) but more on that later.

The second one that I have been involved in was with providing a solution to aid Internal Communications, here at ARN.

As part of the communications projects which I christened , 'Project Listen' (as you do) I was asked to move away from the usual suspects when it comes to internal communications; namely the mass email, the newsletter, the webpage or the intranet and asked to come up with something new and with the times.

After speaking to Tracy Martin and doing some research, the only thing that fit the bill was social media. In layman's terms, imagine facebook for work.

Now just to make it clear, this is not THE facebook that we tend to check every day (some more so than others!) so this is not about creating a page on facebook but acquiring a software that helps create a facebook environment at work.

There are quite a few businesses operating in this area but two that fit what we were after were Yammer and Yackstar.

Yammer is the US big brother of all business social networking that is run at many Fortune 500 companies. I investigated this and when i was satisfied that this would be something that ARN would benefit from then I got a web-meet set up with members of the Leadership Team to have a look at the software.

After the meeting the common consensus was that this was a good software but there was a general hesitancy of getting this into the organisation due to various reasons depending on which area you headed.

Overall, most of the comments seem to be coming with people wearing their black hats.

I enquired the cost and it was quite expensive at $50 USD per user per month. So for a workforce of 500, one would be looking at spending $360,000 USD annually. I knew straight away this would not go through based on cost alone.

The second option was Yackstar. This is an australian clone of Yammer and for a fraction of the cost, does virtually the same thing. Yackstar quoted us at at $5 AUD per user per month. So for a workforce of 500, one would be looking at spending $30,000 AUD annually.
Cost would not be a problem.

While we were going through working out the details of Yackstar, the ARN intranet which was hosted on Sharepoint 2003 crashed and virtually all data on it was lost.

Now there was a project to install Sharepoint 2010 before this happened and this event kinda pushed it even further. Add building renovations on top of that and people across the business are already swamped with what things that needed to happen 'yesterday'.

The solution: I wrote down a project scoping plan which highlighted all the research that was done for this project and the steps involved in case this gets picked up by someone else in the future.