Te Wānanga o Aotearoa has won the Microsoft Award for Technology Innovation at the NZ Tertiary ICT Conference.

The award was for the development of Te Kōpua (the source), the staff intranet, which was created in Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint and launched a year ago.

Digital platform architect Eddie Walker says judges were impressed with the effort the Hangarau team spent connecting kaimahi at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa with a technology solution that meets their needs.

“Hangarau are very honoured and humbled by the recognition for this award. It highlights the effort and passion our whānau in Hangarau have in ensuring we are serving our people. Hopefully it inspires more of our people to etch our whakairo in those glass ceilings,” he says.

Eddie gave a presentation on Indigenising the Digital Workplace using SharePoint online – with Te Kōpua as an example - at the conference, saying the site is now averaging 900 unique visits per day - up from 300 on the older SharePoint 2010 system.

It was a satisfying result after a long development phase, he says.

“For 18 months we looked at what our people were searching for in our SharePoint 2010 intranet and determined that different personas were searching for services related to their role,” he says.

“We sought feedback from those personas; Tumu (executives), Kaiako (tutors), Kaiwhakarite (administrators), Kaiwhakahaere (Managers) and were able to quickly develop the modern pages in SharePoint online and adjust the content to meet the personas’ feedback.”

During the development phase, updates were provided to staff via a Yammer group every two weeks and “by the time we went live there were no surprises as we had over 200 kaimahi who had input into the development”.

Eddie says the digital workplace strategies behind Te Kōpua were:

• Accessibility to our systems, processes and communications anywhere, anytime across New Zealand and the world on any device and Your work, your way.
• Service centric workplace helping ease of navigation and finding content.
• Creating ownership by aligning it to our cultural values.

“We are of the opinion that innovation should be shareable, easy to implement and utilise the tools and technology you have on hand. With the advent of the modern look and feel of SharePoint online we were able to exploit this technology to fulfil a vision for our intranet brought about by our research into what our people required to make their mahi easier.”

He says the project was delivered in-house with input from more than 200 employees, access to analytics about what people searched for and for minimal cost and time of $24,000 and three months to deliver.

It is the second award for Te Kōpua, after it received the 'Special Mention for User Engagement' award at the Digital Workplace of the Year Awards 2018 in Chicago. These are global awards that recognise outstanding contributions to digital workplaces. Eddie has now been invited to speak at next year’s conference in Chicago.