Imtech ICT helps people connect!

Imtech ICT is one of Europe’s leading information and communications technology providers, with approximately 3,000 employees working at subsidiaries in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK. Imtech offers a wide range of solutions and services for clients of all sizes.

“We had a situation where most subsidiaries had their own systems and methods for finding people, but there wasn’t a standardized solution at group level. As the world of ICT becomes more and more globalized, we realized that we needed to be able to respond more effectively to international needs”, explains Jan-Willem Sigtermans, Director of Human Resources at Imtech.

Imtech ICT’s subsidiaries operate as independent business units, but the company wanted to ensure that each subsidiary could benefit from the others’ skills and knowledge.

Jan-Willem Sigtermans says; “For example, if a client in Belgium has an unusual requirement and an Imtech consultant in Austria is the only person with the expertise to fulfill that requirement, the Imtech Belgium team needs to know about it”.

Identifying business opportunities
Jan-Willem Sigtermans adds: “We also realized that many other organizations must be in a similar situation, which presented an exciting opportunity. If we could develop a solution for our own business, we might be able to turn it into a product and sell it to our clients too. With this outcome in mind, we decided to design the solution to be as  flexible as possible – so that it would not only meet our own specific needs, but also be adaptable to other situations”.

Business Benefits

• Enables users to quickly find colleagues
  who have the skills required for specific projects, helping to win new business from clients.
• Provides collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis and forums to help users discuss issues and share knowledge.
• Minimizes training requirements by integrating seamlessly with groupware solutions such as Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes®.
• Maximizes flexibility – the solution can be easily extended with widgets and web services, runs on a variety of platforms, and can also be delivered via a softwareas-a-service model.

The Imtech ICT team evaluated several software products as a foundation for the new solution, and chose IBM® Lotus® Connections.

“We are an IBM Premier Business Partner, so we have a good relationship with IBM – but we also work closely with several other large software vendors, and we looked at their solutions too”, comments Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “We selected Lotus Connections because it has a very open architecture and is easy to integrate with other systems, The solution is compatible with a wide range of operating systems, so it can easily fit in with our clients’ existing infrastructure. In fact, if
clients want, we can even deliver it via a software-as-a-service model, so they don’t need to worry about the infrastructure at all!”

Supporting knowledge-sharing and collaboration
Imtech ICT’s solution, known as C3, provides a number of important features that are designed to support knowledge-sharing and collaboration.

“The most important thing is to connect people with each other” explains Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “If knowledge only exists in the head of a single employee, it is practically useless from a business perspective – particularly if nobody else knows that the person has that knowledge. The C3 solution gives each employee a unique profile where they can list their qualifications, areas of expertise and employment history. Other employees can then search for this information and locate colleagues who have the skills they need. They can then communicate via phone, email, instant message or online collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis and discussion forums – it’s just a matter of a few mouse- clicks.”

Going viral
Within Imtech ICT, the solution has been adopted very rapidly, especially amongst the technical employees – over 90 percent of them populated their profiles within a few weeks of the go-live.“We ran some internal marketing campaigns to promote C3, but the interesting thing was that the solution quickly went viral,” says Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “Employees who signed up saw immediate benefits from the new communities that were created – it gave them an easy way to interact both professionally and socially with colleagues in different countries. As a result, they began sending invitations to their other colleagues to persuade them to sign up as well".

Supporting sales
As well as providing tools to help the technical experts collaborate, the solution is also popular with Imtech ICT’s sales teams. If they are sending a proposal to a potential client, they need to know where the  relevant technical resources are located and find out whether they will be available to work on the project.“On one occasion, a client needed help with a specific problem that was not part of our standard solution portfolio”, comments Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “But by searching C3, we found that one of our employees had relevant experience from a previous job, and they were able to help the client. As a result, we won a deal that normally we wouldn’t even have bid for.”

Meeting the needs of a new generation
Finally, the solution fits in with the social networking trends that are becoming an ever more important aspect of daily life.“Today’s graduates and young professionals have grown up with MySpace and Facebook, and they want to use the same methods of interaction in the workplace” explains Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “It makes us more attractive as an employer, and it also helps new employees fit into the organization and find their way around more quickly. Successful collaboration no longer depends on building up a professional network over many years – C3 can provide a much more dynamic model that doesn’t rely on traditional hierarchies”.

Available now!
Following the success of C3 within Imtech ICT, the company has now added the solution to its product portfolio, and has already implemented it for several of its clients.

“Many of our clients want to run C3 on their own servers, but we also offer a very attractive pricing model for the solution via a software-as-a-service model”, concludes Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “In this case, the solution runs in the cloud, and companies subscribe to a monthly or annual fee per user. Thanks to the extreme flexibility of the platform, we can deliver it in almost any form our clients require”.


“Successful collaboration no longer depends on building up a professional network over many years – C3 can provide a much more dynamic model that doesn’t rely on traditional hierarchies”
— Jan-Willem Sigtermans, Director of Human Resources.
Contact:

• FRITZ & MACZIOL GmbH (Germany)
• Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions (Netherlands)

C3 is a product of Imtech ICT.

See also: Lotus Germany