Podcast
That’s the challenge that Chris Harrer and his team at Comcast faced when tasked with bringing this fragmented digital ecosystem together into a seamless digital employee experience with the relaunch of the company’s intranet, ComcastNow.
In this episode of Get Reworked, Chris, former AVP of digital internal communications at Comcast and IMPACT award winner gives us an inside look into how he and his team untangled the fragmented digital ecosystem that was ComcastNow, the company's intranet, to deliver an unified digital employee experience.
Listen: Get Reworked Full Episode List
"We did a lot of research. We did surveys, obviously, and we did many individual stakeholder sessions. I think we did 36 stakeholder sessions, and that went from everywhere from literally the CIO, the CHRO, all the way down to department heads. We did end users in general, all the way from the frontline all the way up. Everyone's a user in the end," said Chris.
Highlights of the conversation include:
- The unexpected challenges that came up during the project.
- The response to the relaunched ComcastNow.
- What Chris wishes he knew when he started that he knew when he ended.
Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].
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Show Notes
- Chris's full interview on Three Dots
- Chris on LinkedIn
Show Transcript
Siobhan Fagan: 100,000 employees, 15 intranets and who knows how many individual department SharePoint sites.
That’s the challenge that Chris Harrer and his team at Comcast faced when tasked with bringing this fragmented digital ecosystem together into a seamless digital employee experience with the relaunch of the company’s intranet, ComcastNow. At the time, Chris was the associate vice president, digital internal communications for Comcast. Chris drove the strategy and vision behind Comcast’s award-winning global intranet, which launched last July.
We invited Chris to join us on Reworked’s TV show, Three Dots, to discuss how he and his team went from a “fragmented digital ecosystem” to Comcast winning Reworked’s “Innovative Use of Workplace Technology” Impact award earlier this year. The judges commended Chris and his team’s work for their “attention to detail” and their thoughtful approach to stakeholder interviews which led to cross-departmental alignment on the updated ComcastNow platform.
Chris himself has won numerous awards, including recognition as a finalist for our employee experience leader award this year and for collaboration excellence in 2022.
But that’s enough of me talking. Let’s hear from Chris about why the work started with a lot of conversations:
Chris Harrer: It's a global company, over 100,000 employees, a lot going on. So there's a lot of stakeholdering that needs to be done. So everyone could be on board with the vision and the direction that you're heading.
So and to get everybody, all these other sites on board. Yeah, there were a lot of discussions and with everyone from senior leadership down to, you know, director level to get them to join. Some people really didn't want to at first. They said, you know what, we're good, our site works. And I said, well, but, you know, it would be better if you're on board. And the reasons behind that, but a lot of those types of conversations had to happen and a lot of presenting. I did a lot of decks and presenting over the first year.
But we also did, we did a lot of research. And with all that, I mean, we did surveys, obviously, and we did many sessions with individual stakeholder sessions. I think we did 36 stakeholder sessions, and that went from everywhere from literally the CIO, the CHRO, all the way down to department heads and that type of stuff. We did end users just in general, all the way from frontline all the way up. Everyone's a user in the end. We did SME groups, so we did like an analytics group just so we could understand all the different aspects.
Did IA testing, which we did a bunch of IA tree testing, which was fascinating. To understand how an executive finds the same document as a frontline employee and the routes that they take to get to that document was just wow. And, but based on that, we had an original IA information architecture laid out. From that testing, we were like, we need to rework this. This should be easier.
So through all that, we made decisions and changes. And that went on for probably six months with all of the research and all of that. But we had some key takeaways from the research. And the good news was that the brand, I'll call it the brand of ComcastNow was really strong because we were thinking originally, let's totally new platform, new look and feel, let's rename it. But the brand was so strong that we're like, you know what? No, let's keep ComcastNow and that brand because it's super strong. It was just falling a little short of what expectations were.
Siobhan: The strength of the ComcastNow brand was one surprise Chris encountered during his stakeholder interviews. But he came across another one that turned out to be a bit of a puzzle.
Chris: One of the big surprises, well, I shouldn't call it a big surprise, but one of the things that really we had to work through was the people data.
We had that the old system was targeted, but it wasn't really personalized. Going into the personalization realm, you really need strong data if you want to do personalization well. And we are such a big company and we've acquired other companies to grow and through the years, so our people data, in Workday in Azure and all that is it gets a little, it's great at the top level, but as you get dig deeper and deeper to get more and more personalized, it can get a little messy with all the different job titles and divisions and regions and businesses. So working through that was a lot of work.
There was a lot of kind of patches in there to make it work on the old system, but we said, you know what, if we're gonna do this right, we need to fix that data. And most of the data is in Workday, and then it comes over into Azure, and we needed to get more of the Workday data into Azure.
But that being said, you have to work with compliance, with security, with legal to say, okay, we're allowed to bring that over into Azure, because now it's going to be in the Microsoft cloud, not just the Workday cloud. So a lot of that, those types of conversations had to happen to really get that.
Siobhan: Throughout the process, Chris’s vision went beyond delivering a new intranet to delivering what he likes to call ‘a weekend experience during the week.’ I asked him how he approached integrating all of the different technologies that made up that 'weekend experience.'
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Chris: The PTO thing was a big one here. Like I think every modern intranet has PTO integrated into it now, at least 90% of them I would say. That was an interesting conversation or conversations I should say, with leadership here because there was a lot of, we'll just send them to Workday. Yes, but it's seven clicks to get that PTO. And I did the analysis for all that and it ended up being about 17,000 hours worth of time wasted clicking to your PTO, which equated to about $890,000 a year in productivity costs. Now that's soft money, so, but in the end, we saved anywhere from five to 10 million clicks a year. Just on a PTO integration, because now it's one click. That's the type of stuff you wanna bring in. So we did that.
We also did learning and development. Those numbers are even more than the PTO, which was interesting. So those things, you're bringing them in so you don't have to go from platform to platform to platform to do this stuff. And those are the things you really wanna bring in. And that comes through the research that you do. What are those core things that really affect the masses. And then once you get those core ones done, then you can really start to get into the smaller groups.
Like we're going to implement next week, not next week, in a couple of weeks, our thank you platform, which is another platform. But we have a piece of it that is going to be, you can do the thank you piece right from the intranet. So you don't have to go to the other platform, find the thank you section of it. It's just literally, thank somebody right there. And that's a great thing to have. And it's quick and easy, again, saving time. I didn't do the analysis of what that's gonna save, but that's gonna save time as well.
So all those types of things and like paycheck, I wanna, we have a paycheck button to actually have your pay stub show. There's some legal ramifications there and that has to be done a certain way. That's another one, that's a big one. But just discovering all those things that you can accomplish within the intranet without having to leave, that's the stuff that's going to bring them there, which then you will say, oh, you know what, while I'm here, let me just read this article that popped up.
Siobhan: It’s now been a year since ComcastNow was relaunched. When I spoke with Chris back in April I asked about the response to the updated platform:
Chris: Fantastic. Fantastic. The numbers are awesome. We've from I just did a quick assessment and. We're up from a content consumption standpoint, year-over-year, we're up 60%. So it's like 3.1 million content views. And I say content because it's articles, it's evergreen content, all that minus the homepage. I don't count the homepage because that's hit millions and millions of times. But we went from like 3.1 million content views, year-over-year from the second half of the year, to 5.6 million. So just a massive amount of uptick in content.
And there's many reasons. I mean, the new user experience with the new IA, all of that, there's so much involved. The global nav, how we kind of laid everything out. More people are on there. We have those other intranets on there. So a lot of reasons behind it, but it's been a huge success so far.
Siobhan: As a final question I asked Chris what he wished he knew when he started the project that he learned along the way …
Chris: I would say if I knew the complexities of the ecosystem at Comcast and because it's a really big company and just how expansive the technology teams are and all the different sections and just understanding some of the process that was involved to get certain things done. You know, if I was to do it all over again, I'd probably do more stakeholdering.
But, you know, just learning the ecosystem of Comcast. Because when I started this, I was right in the early stages of being at Comcast. So I just hit four years. We started this within like six months of me starting. So I didn't really know the ecosystem and how everything worked. So if I knew that now, going into the project definitely would take a few different right turns and left turns.
But overall, I mean, where would we come out? I think we'd come out in pretty much the same place. Would have been just a little easier, probably.
Siobhan: So there you have it. Congratulations once again to Chris, his former team and to Comcast on their award winning relaunch. If you think you have what it takes to win an Impact award, be sure to watch for our announcement on the next award season later this summer. In the mean time, I hope you’ll join me once again on Get Reworked and on Three Dots.
If you have a suggestion or a topic for a future conversation, I'm all ears. Please drop me a line at [email protected]. Additionally, if you liked what you heard,please share Get Reworked with anyone you think might benefit from these types of conversations — word of mouth marketing is the best marketing anyone could ask for. You can find more coverage of related topics on reworked.co. Thank you again for exploring the revolution of work with me, and I'll see you next time.