Mediasurface UK Announces InterContinental Hotels Group Launches EMEA Intranet
STAMFORD, CN, October 31, 2005. Mediasurface UK announced that it has enabled the Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) to launch the first phase of its new global intranet.
Completed within just three months, phase one of the intranet will be used by IHG employees spread across six corporate offices and 614 hotels within the European, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) regions. This global project is the first of its kind for IHG, and will create a dynamic, personalized site with lots of built-in functionality to share knowledge and best practice between its different regions, brands and hotels. The new site allows a personalized view for each employee, with the home page opening as their individual hotel or corporate department and built-in access controls delivering all the information and business applications needed for their role.
The content management system has allowed seamless integration with all business applications. Services such as hotel reporting, IHG email, quality audit and guest satisfaction applications, promotions, risk management, guest satisfaction and tracking, events calendars and even Christmas card ordering for each hotel, can be accessed through the system. For example, all employees will have access to 'myHR,' an area where they can look at their training and development needs, competency and self development, book themselves into training courses, and access and file holiday forms and expenses.
The new intranet was built using the Mediasurface content management system and the innovative content authoring tool, Morello. There are currently around 80 content authors, a number expected to rise significantly with the amount of content being added to the site.
David House, Senior Vice President within Global HR at IHG said, "The most important element in making this project a success was the ease of use of the system we chose, this was in order to gain rapid acceptance across a diverse user base. Morello is unique in that regard, no other product we looked at came anywhere close to it."
With seven individual hotel brands including Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza, IHG operates under a de-centralized business model across nearly 100 countries. House continued; "The new system will facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing across all departments, brands and regions. The EMEA intranet is the first step toward a much needed worldwide portal environment for the entire company."