Great intranets: Unisys

Part I of a four part series on great intranets.

“Technology is just the enabler; people and process drive social business,” says Gloria Burke, Chief Knowledge Officer, Unisys.


Unisys is a worldwide information technology company that provides a portfolio of IT services, software, and technology and more than 23,000 employees in more than 100 countries. The Unisys social intranet is an integrated intranet (built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013) that has evolved over time with the Unisys population. And although the intranet has been supplemented with additional technology – including FAST, Sitrion (Newsgator), Microsoft Lync, SalesForce.com – to bring alive the native functionality found in SharePoint, Unisys has put the principal focus and effort into people and process, not technology.

“Focus on culture; people drive success, technology is the enabler,” says Burke. “Bring in the champions within each organization of the company to be active change agents.”

Reporting to the CIO, as Chief Knowledge Officer, Gloria Burke owns the intranet and chairs the Intranet Steering Committee, and a Knowledge & CollaborationStakeholders Council with senior leaders from across the company — business units, HR, IT, legal, finance, marketing, global operations, and more.

The Unisys home page features the standard elements including global navigation, search, feature stories and audience news, and features, and links to executive blogs and federated video from its You-Tube channel,. Employees can in fact choose the language of choice for navigating the Unisys intranet, Inside Unisys. My News is targeted specifically to the individual based on region and organization, and language preferences.

However, the impressive elements to the Unisys intranet portal, are the social components. The collaborative approach to a social intranet have delivered impressive results:

  • 91% adoption rate of social technology tools and processes amongst target knowledge workers
  • 100% of Senior Management have and are active users of My Sites, microblogging and communities
  • $5.2 million annualized savings in telephony costs

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Toby Ward is the Founder and Chair of the Intranet Global Forum conferences, and CEO and Founder of Prescient Digital Media and Social Business Interactive. Toby’s global clients include Harvard, HSBC, Mastercard, Pepsi, Sony, USAA and dozens of others.