A global footprint for a unique, yet unified IT presence
As our company expands in the global market, so must our IT presence. Our European offices have grown substantially in the last 10 years, and thus, we established a unique, but connected Europe IT office. The questions on the minds of employees were, but not limited to:
Who’s in charge?
What differentiates the European IT presence from the American and other sites’ IT presence?
Who do I call with problems?
What’s available now?
What’s coming next?
Where can I go to learn more?
How does this affect me?
When is all of this change happening?
Which sites are affected?
Why do we need a European IT presence?
In my case, the question was – How do we make this information available to those who are asking these questions, and how do we keep the answers evergreen, as they update?
After we determined what problem we were trying to solve through a series of consultations with the head of Europe IT, we did a review of who the main site users would be, what content they would be looking for, and what content he, as our client, was hoping to share.
Part of this process was asking the head of Europe IT what a typical workday looked like for him. As he started talking about his day, he commented that he spent more time than he would like fording calls from employees in our European offices simply looking for tech support. As a more strategic head, having already hired people and implemented processes for remediation of these issues, it was a particularly nagging legacy task.
The business goal of explaining "who we are and what we do" needed to be scalable for both business and IT partners from around the globe. This goal would also need to be balanced with an established, far more common user goal of needing a place to consult when they didn't know who to call with tech support issues. Because we also determined that the audience would be purely internal, we proposed a custom SharePoint site with search engine optimization so that any employee who searched from our internal browser would have an easy time finding it.
First, I created custom compositions for the design of the site and worked closely with the Europe IT head to develop branding that felt both unique to their office, but compliant with company brand standards. He liked the idea of using sort of a quilt of colorful shapes as a reusable pattern, but also toning it down with the hues of blue that the enterprise had come to associate with IT. I made sure to balance the desire for custom branding with scalability by isolating custom solutions to features that were not likely to change over time and using more out-of-the-box SharePoint components for sections that were likely to change.
After a series of approvals and changed, I built the site in HTML5 and CSS. I was also sure to code the site fully responsively, as many users would need to access tech support information via mobile devices.
Funny—when I first engaged with this client, what he asked for was to replicate our entire intranet site, but to change all of the content to reflect Europe IT instead. By working closely with this client and understanding his and our users' goals, we were able to propose a better, scalable, and less expensive solution that is still being utilized and updated to this day.
