The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation provides credit information on businesses and corporations. In 2007, a partner of RealDecoy, McMillan and Associates, contracted us to provide planning for Dun & Bradstreet’s corporate intranet—D&BNet.
We were basically able to take what you delivered to us and run with it—and I am very happy with where we ended up. Thank you for all your help with this project – you did a great job of guiding us through a daunting exercise.
Kristin Hirsch
D&BNet Manager
Dun & Bradstreet
After extensive investigation, research and planning, RealDecoy developed a new information architecture and strategic approach for Dun & Bradstreet’s corporate intranet site.
THE CHALLENGE
Pure chaos on the intranet
D&BNet had become cluttered and unorganized—40,000 pages deep with almost 400 sub sites that spanned six continents and were available in multiple languages. There was no effective content management system in place and the Intranet was clogged with redundant, outdated and trivial content.
The U.S. intranet site was serving as Dun & Bradstreet’s main intranet despite the fact that it catered to the American market. Other countries were creating their own intranet sites but they were unable to leverage the content on the main U.S. site.
In addition, those working on specific projects were creating ‘team sites’ that crossed various geographic and departmental boundaries.
A multi-functional intranet
The site offered information on numerous areas from HR and process to initiatives and social events.
What’s more, some of the content on the site was organized by content (e.g. HR materials, product tools) while some of it was organized by function (e.g., team sites, geographic regions). There was however no consistency or method of navigating between the two effectively.
A lack of a dating convention
There was no dating convention for content on the site. Visitors were unsure when documents were published on the intranet. Thus, they were unable to verify the latest content when provided with several versions.
The entire site needed to be re-architected to become more user-centric.
OUR SOLUTION
Planning a better intranet site
RealDecoy investigated all aspects of Dun & Bradstreet’s intranet site including user requirements. The goal was to plan a site that would work for Dun & Bradstreet’s various working groups and departments within the company as well as the intranet team.
To develop an information architecture that would work for D&B we needed to go through a series of exercises including a site audit, online user survey, site analytics evaluation, stakeholder interviews and card sorting exercises. This research led to the development of several iterations of a revised information architecture and wireframes for key pages of the intranet site.
Finally, we delivered a report that identified best practices for structure, navigation, design, content and governance to facilitate the maintenance of the intranet site moving forward.
