Empowering IBM employees with a reinvigorated intranet

The IBM intranet—known as w3—serves as a centralized platform for obtaining insights about the people, tools and applications that drive the company. To offer a more user-friendly and personalized experience to IBM employees—while removing the dependency on older virtualized infrastructure in favor of containerized workloads and a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline—the IBM Chief Information Office (CIO) organization decided to revamp w3.

However, revamping the platform required an overhaul to the infrastructure, service and application layers, while adopting a robust design framework to bring a consumer-grade corporate intranet experience to IBM employees. The initiative sought  to normalize and harmonize the IT stack into something more sensible, supportable and maintainable.

To unify and consolidate the w3 platform, the CIO organization took a phased approach using an agile development methodology.

First, the team moved from a legacy infrastructure to a CIO Hybrid Cloud platform² container infrastructure. The migration helped upskill those involved by demanding a better understanding of what goes into deploying, managing and distributing IBM applications and services. In turn, this introduced rigor, hygiene and stability by standardizing the release management process.

As part of the migration, the team rolled out these w3 proxy service upgrades:

• The same service handles both reverse proxies and redirects, streamlining the overall architecture.
  
• The shortest path routing algorithm directs users to the closest of 8 locations globally, contributing to faster response times.
  
• Asset compression and caching  help boost performance for users.
  
• The w3 cookie-less domain intends to expedite content load times and reduce overall request size.

Second, the team assessed and refined the infrastructure elements, implementing a range of improvements to better align with business needs, such as:

• Identifying outdated systems, duplicate solutions and underutilized resources
• Formulating a well-defined roadmap for technology adoption
• Monitoring, evaluating and adjusting performance as needed

Third, the team brought together the data and services underneath the IT support platform, directory data, landing page and news platform to create innovative frameworks and practices, employing the IBM Carbon Design System³, GraphQL and ReactJS. The new framework illustrated user activity across the intranet, letting the CIO organization know where users have problems, the tools in which they are interested and what is important to them. Having that type of understanding helped prioritize the backlog, determine user interface (UI) hierarchy and deliver a personalized user experience (UX).

Once the move to CIO Hybrid Cloud platform, technology optimization and application refactoring were completed, the new w3 foundation was established with IBM® watsonx.ai™, IBM watsonx Assistant™ and large language models (LLMs) powered by IBM Granite™. This resulted in a revitalized, reinvigorated intranet—as referred to in Figure 1 below:

The new w3 at IBM offers a range of advantages, for example:

Before: The search functionality was disjointed and confined to individual sections.
After: An integrated search interface to enable the user to filter search results by people, news, applications or IT support information. It also includes the capability to narrow down search results based on location, language and date.

Before: There were no adjustable settings.
After: Settings to control the platform’s appearance, languages, locations, interests and notifications. Notification preferences encompass device and password management alerts, blog subscriptions, and trending topics.

Before: The employee directory was reachable via a separate web portal with restricted methods to connect with fellow IBM employees.
After: A People page to explore, engage, and initiate colleague interactions.

Before: News layout and profile options required modifications to facilitate navigation.
After: A News tab to help users stay updated and well-informed about IBM happenings, initiatives, and events relevant to their role through content curation.

Before: The applications details were available on multiple platforms per operating system, without a single licensing management location.
After: An Apps area to acquire, upgrade, administer, and return software licenses with application recommendations based on job roles and business units.

Before: Users requested IT support from a standalone website with limited dynamic and customized outage messages.
After: An IT Support hub with key resources and outages, and a display of current support tickets, contact information, and appointments. Additionally, it grants access to an AI-powered self-service system, AskIT⁴, to get answers for different IT-related questions.

Before: AskIBM⁵ was nonexistent.
After: An AskIBM link where IBM employees can use generative AI (gen AI) to accelerate and simplify routine business activities, such as drafting an e-mail, translating a document, searching for information, producing summaries, generating actionable ideas, and more. The AskIBM alpha release started production in early January 2024.

During the w3 digital evolution, the CIO organization collaborated with the watsonx product teams and IBM Research® to help scale IBM product offerings for enterprise release. The team also shared accomplishments and best practices with clients. These discussions addressed the IBM intranet development approach and the expertise of IBM Consulting® to replicate comparable environments.