The Highways Agency (HA) is an Executive Agency of England’s Department for Transport, and is responsible for operating, maintaining and improving this strategic road network. HA's purpose is to provide safe and reliable roadways through management of traffic and administration of the network.

In recent years HA has moved toward a more efficient, customer-focused operation. This plan is part of HA’s effort to comply with England’s ‘Modernising Government Initiative’, which mandates government agencies to use technology to better serve the public, and the Agency’s desire to improve performance of its staff through increased efficiency. As a result, HA is focusing on improving business processes and empowering HA employees with the tools they need to deliver on its business objectives and public service responsibilities.

“The goal for the HA Intranet was for it to become the single, consistent and up-to-date information source for all Agency staff, no matter their location,” says Simon Amos, Portal Manager at HA. “A key component of the portal was to deliver functionality that would allow it to also act as the primary internal communication system for HA employees.”

The Agency had a number of disparate, data sources that housed personnel data that made it difficult for employees to find accurate organization and contact information within their business area and across other HA business areas. Disparate data repositories also created challenges for the Agency in finding and deploying one, easy-to-use enterprise directory solution.

HA began looking for a cost-effective, web-based address book that could be deployed as part of their portal and could provide an accurate set of people data that they could prominently display on the HA Intranet. The Agency outlined key business goals and technical requirements to ensure the solution could be successfully implemented as the Agency’s single source of enterprise and employee information. After extensive market research HA selected Nakisa’s 100% thin client solution that demonstrated the ability to:

• Centralize organizational information for easy, employee access – no matter their location.
• Simultaneous access and graphically display organizational information from HA’s 4 separate data sets housed in Oracle PeopleSoft, MS-SQL and MS Active Directory systems.
• Easily share organizational information enterprise-wide via the web with no requirement for user download or plug-in.
• Ensure up-to-date organizational information via self-service functionality that empowers Agency employees to update their personal information on-the-fly.
• Deploy within HA’s existing Plumtree portal infrastructure.

HA deployed a number of Nakisa modules to deliver a complete solution that significantly improves their employees’ ability to access enterprise information and collaborate with colleagues while also reducing the time and cost involved in administration of organizational data:

• Nakisa OrgChart:  HA staff can visualize and navigate dynamic organizational charts and employee position structures.
• Nakisa Directory:  Users can access and search up-to-date employee directory and organization information.
• Nakisa SelfService:  HA employees can view and update their personal information using only a web-browser.

“Nakisa provides the visual picture of HA data needed for employees to get to the information they need, when they need it,” says Ian Richmond, Portal Developer/Nakisa Administrator at HA. “By providing a consolidated view and centralized access point into all employee and enterprise information, employee collaboration is made easy because users can quickly find the individual, department or business area they need to get work done.”

Because employees have secure on-line access to manage and maintain their data “People Finder” can be kept up-to-date and accurate. This increases employee efficiency, productivity and collaboration due to their ability to quickly view and act on accurate employee and organization information.

“HA staff needs to no longer rely on outdated, paper-based documents”, continued Ian. “They now look to the HA Intranet, and Nakisa’s solution, as their consistent organization information source.”

Not only is a dynamic view available online, but Nakisa provides HA employees with the ability to print out organization charts and directory information; as well as to export organization data to MS-Excel to support any offline work that needs to be done.

“Nakisa has helped HA to break down the Agency’s silos of communication by bringing organization and employee contact information into one single, intuitive user interface,” says Nicholas Gott, Portal Content Manager.

With implementation of Nakisa’s software HA now benefits from:

• Improved collaboration and communication among employees.
• Efficient sharing of information and simplified access to people, organization resources and business information.
• A centralized web view of organizational information for initiation of business processes.