I do a little, you do a little, and together we do a lot. This is a concept that’s deeply embedded in the business model for IKEA, the global home furnishing giant with over 270 stores in 36 countries. The strong sense of teamwork, community, and collaboration expressed in this simple principle forms the basis of IKEA’s organizational and operational culture. It means as much to those working in HR, Sales, and Marketing as it does to consumers who buy the company’s flat packed furniture that they assemble themselves.
A strong corporate culture, however, doesn’t always translate into effective information systems. In fact, when done poorly, the latter can be a detriment to the former. There’s always been an unfortunate disconnect between technology-based systems and the people they’re meant to support. But IKEA’s humanistic, people-focused approach to its business naturally carried over to the development of its intranet.
Rather than forcing its corporate culture to bend to accommodate a technology-based system, IKEA used its firmly established culture as the foundation for its IT solutions. It’s an approach that garnered IKEA North America’s intranet, IKEA Inside, much praise when it was recognized as one of the world’s ten best intranets of 2008 by the user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group (NNG). It’s an approach that enables IKEA to keep all its employees up-to-date with everything going on within the company. And it’s an approach that defines the true purpose and spirit of an intranet: To bring people and information together.
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