Kroger Intranet Portal

The Problem:The Kroger Co. spans many states with store formats that include grocery and multi-department stores, convenience stores, and jewelry stores. They had no way to bring this vast group of entities together to allow them to communicate and manage their areas.

The solution: GreatPeople.me is Kroger’s store intranet portal built using IBM’s Digital Experience Portfolio. It provides many capabilities and delivers business value including:

Two-way communication between associates and the company
Mechanism for sharing important news and stories
Accessibility anywhere

Challenges

The project was floundering. This was my first assignment with Perficient. My manager told me they were sending me to Cincinnati to ‘smooth things out’.

Solution: Meet as many stakeholders as quickly as possible and ensure them that we’d be able to work with them to get the desired product. Another tactic was to get everyone involved through Participatory design. This made them feel like they were contributing and it built team cohesion. Finally, we identified the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and tackled that to get some quick wins and build up confidence.

Results

General

Polished UI interactions such as carousels and rich news articles
Personalized experience
Secured content and sites for divisions one belongs to
Role driven capabilities

Corporate Content

Content is critical to GreatPeople.me

Business owners are empowered to manage content without IT intervention
WCM projects are leveraged with authoring templates and workflows to empower business
Content is managed across over 20 divisions
It is delivered to a single portal but still has multiple experiences
Includes embedded video that is device agnostic

Integration Points

In addition to content, there are important integration points including:

Social integration using Yammer
Site search is implemented with the Google Search Appliance to crawl WCM content
Information center which has a people finder
Business owners are empowered to manage content without IT intervention

Lessons Learned

Keep it simple – Leverage your knowledge of portal and the technology
Don’t reinvent the wheel – For example, Flowplayer was used for HTML5 video
Simplify the authoring experience as much as possible for content authors – completely abstract HTML and JavaScript from authoring processes
Optimized individual pages to maximize performance using theme and WCM capabilities

The Process: