8:00 a.m.
Registration & Continental Breakfast

8:30 a.m.
Chairperson’s Opening Of Day Two

Michael Rudnick
TOWERS WATSON
Conference Chairperson

8:35 a.m.

How To Turn Your Intranet Into A Key Collaboration Platform That Drives Your Business Initiatives

Founded in 1946, Instron manufactures and services materials testing equipment. Its products are used to evaluate the mechanical properties of materials and components. Instron provides its customers with a wide- range of services related to those products. Headquartered in Norwood, MA, Instron has a geographically distributed workforce with many locations throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

In this session, you will discover how to evolve your intranet into a key collaboration platform in support of your corporate strategies and business initiatives, including:

• Balancing you intranet and company culture
• The governance vs. adoption trade-off
• What makes some initiatives fail while others succeed?
• Discovering if your intranet can grow organically
• Understanding how important management buy-in really is

Joerg Meissner, Director IT
INSTRON

9:05 a.m.

Ensuring Success With A Social Intranet: How To Connect With Employees, Foster Discussions & Harness The Power Of The Hub

Leaders and communicators are effectively sparking conversation and connecting employees with each other, management and the information they need to work more effectively. These conversations include, but aren’t limited to, executive blogging, fostering discussions, voicing concerns, and addressing business issues.

This session will provide you with specific examples about how your communicators and leaders alike can be successful on a social intranet, including:

• How executive blogging will allow you to connect with your employees in a more personal way and to lay out your vision for the future of the business
• Fostering discussions so your employees can make their opinions heard and have an exchange on how the issues impacts your business
• Connecting employees with each other to share ideas and foster solutions
• Harnessing the power of The Hub to solve business problems by using community and crowdsourcing methods to extend live events expose more people to great content

Edward Ford, Enterprise Community Manager
THOMSON REUTERS

9:35 a.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

9:45 a.m.

Morning Refreshment & Networking Break

10:00 a.m.

Digest Session:
Are Your Intranet And SharePoint Strategies A Success

Discuss ways that you have been able to successful measure your Intranet & SharePoint strategy progress. What tools and analytics do you use? Do you measure whether people are viewing fewer pages while seeking specific information? Whether employees are using the intranet more? Are employees spending more time in the appropriate areas demonstrating the ease of information finding & increased engagement?

10:30 a.m.

How To Create A Branded, Employee-Driven Intranet

Teen retailer, American Eagle Outfitters (AEO), had a need to overhaul its intranet to be as casual and cool as its fashion and customers. This session will explore the challenges of taking an IT-centric intranet and giving it to the employees and People Department of AEO to produce a branded, employee-driven, intranet for the company’s thousands of office and field associates.

This session will provide you with the most effective techniques to draw your employees to the intranet and have them build it, including:

• Tips for recruiting Intranet Ambassadors
• What’s an Intranet to do with merged companies or brands?
• Creating a content-rich, social media-based intranet
• Measurement Metrics: from good to great
• Five essential elements to have your intranet always be current & fresh

Richard Borden, Director – Internal Communications,
AMERICAN EAGLE OUTFITTERS, INC.

11:00 a.m.

How To Accelerate Communication And Information- Sharing Across Your Entire Organization By Embracing Social Technology

As a corporate communicator, you focus on sending the right organizational message to the right people at the right time. However, in many organizations, the message is often lost among the overload of information and communication – much of which still happens via email or is lost in static publishing portals. The reality is that people engage in networks, employees collaborate in groups, and communication is inherently social.

Today, it is crucial for you to embrace new social technology that accelerates communication and information sharing, enables your employees to be more agile, and produces better outcomes driving results for your organization. This is achieved by engaging people and their collective talent, knowledge, expertise, ideas, and efforts through social networks.

This session will show you how NewsGator Technologies, a social software vendor, is utilizing social technology and SharePoint to help change the way they communicate and collaborate, and how you can do it too, including:

• Defining your audiences for targeted, relevant, and secure communications

• Reevaluating your portals and making them social

• Ending “email push” and focusing on the “social pull” of communities

Jenay Sellers, Interactive Marketing Coordinator
Rich Blank, Solutions Engineer
NEWSGATOR TECHNOLOGIES

11:30 a.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

11:40 a.m.

Digest Session: Developing Effective Content

The goal of your intranet is to foster collaboration, engage employees, and inform employees. Discuss with your peers how you are developing content that successfully achieves these goals.

12:10 p.m.
Lunch On Your Own -- But Not Alone!

Join a group of your colleagues for a themed lunch with an informal discussion surrounding an intranet hot topic! Take this opportunity to join others in a small, interactive group setting to network and brainstorm solutions to your most pressing intranet concerns.

1:35 p.m.

Transform Your Intranet Into A Business Tool That Drives Results

Don't just look at your intranet migration as an implementation project. Shouldn't it be a business tool that delivers improved business processes and added value?

To ensure that, you must start with a business-led strategy that puts the business in front of the technology. This session offers recent real-world examples of what one company did to put the business into their intranets' driver's seat, showing you how to maximize your intranet to drive business results, including how to:

• Create a strategic decision tool grounded in your business goals
• Drive adoption by putting business processes online
• Ensure the right players are involved in the right ways
• Pitch for the necessary funding

Rob Colwill, CEO
COLDWATER SOFTWARE

Stacy L. Wilson, ABC, President and Senior Consultant
ELOQUOR CONSULTING, INC.

2:05 p.m.

How To Revamp Your Company’s Intranet With No Budget And Little IT Support

Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers started back in 1958 as a small family-run business. Today, with 1,300 full-time employees spread across 25 countries, they are a global operation and are the world's largest auctioneer of heavy equipment and trucks. Of course growth is a good thing, but sometimes growing too quickly can be hard on communications within an organization. The company’s intranet was case in point. No one really owned it, people added items continually, but neglected to take old materials off, and no one could intuitively find what they needed in a quick and efficient way. The Corporate Communications Department wanted to take this communications tool to the next level, but didn’t have extra money in the budget and couldn’t convince the IT department for bodies for the project.

What could they do? They did the only thing they could—they took the project into their own hands and made huge changes at a grassroots level: from content organization, site development, content upload and moderation.

• Learning how to involve key stakeholders to structure content with a card-sorting exercise
• Giving power to your employees instead of having just a few intranet administrators
• Understanding how you can build an intranet even if you have no IT background
• Building an instant community
• Proving how your new revamped intranet will save your organization time and money with the use of metrics

Ian Malinski, Corporate Communications Specialist
Kim Schulz, Manager, Corporate Communications
RITCHIE BROS. AUCTIONEERS

2:35 p.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

3:05 p.m.

How To Leverage Social Business Software To Improve Internal Communications, Enable More Effective Collaboration, And Increase Employee Engagement

SunTrust Banks, Inc. is one of the top 20 financial services holding companies in the U.S. with 1,651 retail branches and 2,914 ATMs located primarily in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic states.  In the midst of unprecedented change and uncertainty in the banking industry, the importance of delivering effective strategic internal communications has never been so critical. 

To meet rapidly-evolving industry, regulatory, and competitive challenges, SunTrust’s 28,000 geographically dispersed employees need to be well-informed, fully aligned with the company strategy and enabled to work smarter and more efficiently than ever before.  However, traditional internal communications vehicles (e.g. company email, corporate intranet, meetings, etc.) fall short in their ability to effectively support these needs. 

In 2011, SunTrust's Consumer Banking segment began evaluating social business software solutions with features such as public and private discussion groups, employee profiles, document sharing, document collaboration, blogs, etc.  The goal was to leverage these tools throughout the company to improve the effectiveness of internal communications, enable employees to collaborate more effectively, and increase engagement.

This session will provide you with the benefits of implementing social business solutions in your organization, as well as practical advice and creative ideas that can be immediately applied, including:

• The growing importance of social media in the workplace (social business) and how to harness it to your advantage

• The differences between how we communicate at work vs. how we communicate outside of work
• The features, benefits, and leading providers of social business solutions
• Building the business case, gaining sponsorship, overcoming challenges, driving adoption, and measuring success

Michael Kissiah, Internal Communications Manager, PMP
SUNTRUST BANK, INC.

3:35 p.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

3:45 p.m.

Digest Session: Your Intranets Future

Discuss with fellow attendees and speakers what you would do with your Intranet if there were no restrictions, no budgets, no privacy concerns.

4:15 p.m.
Chairperson’s Recap: Key Takeaways And What To Do When You Get Back To The Office

We’ll recap the highlights of the past two days and ask you to share key insights and next steps with the group.

Michael Rudnick
TOWERS WATSON
Conference Chairperson

4:30 p.m.

Close Of General Sessions

Expand Your Learning!
Attend your choice of hands-on workshops on
Friday, November 30, 2012:

C: 8:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. - How To Transform Your Intranet Content To Meet The Needs Of Your Updated Intranet And Its Users

D: 12:30 a.m. - 3:30 a.m. - How To Increase Your Organization’s SharePoint Capabilities Using Mobile Collaboration, And The Benefits To Your Bottom Line