Passageways Blog : Transforming Enterprise and Industry Knowledge into New Success

The increasing compartmentalization of employees based on department, role, specialty, locations, etc. has led to an erosion of their understanding of the hospital's organizational identity. There is at times a gap between the hospitals commucations of needs and requirements and employees ability to get access to this information. This leads to a gap in understanding the organization identity in the minds of their most valuable resources and a lack of belonging to the organization as a whole. This displacement creates a change in the organization transforming career passion to just a job.

Frequent and sincere efforts are made to ensure employee understanding of a hospital's goals and actions.  These can take the form of all employee mails, intranets, seminars, updates on website, meetings with senior staff, media reports, etc., each with varying degree of success. E-mail remains the most often used and readily accessible to most employees and is great for quick updates.  The biggest problem with e-mail is that it is lacking in creating continuity for communicating the path to the goals. E-mail has also burgeoned over the past few years both in terms of use and space requirements leaving everyone a little indifferent to them. Many hospitals developed Intranets as a way to alleviate some of that apathy but were hampered in the past by ease of use, hours of IT time to update information, lack of compelling business applications to help employee do their jobs, and a structure that required you to know the organization in and out before you could find information. In the age of Google, social media, and collaboration a lot of them are outdated legacy systems that get perfunctory lip service. Plus they are expensive to maintain.

With web 2.0 and intranets, powered by portal technology, past problems are something that can be remedied by hospitals. Intranet Portals are now less IT team dependant and more built around knowledge experts and content managers who have the ability to update the hospital's intranet. This frees valuable resources to focus on reaching the organization's goal and avoids duplication of efforts. The ease of updating and maintaining of the intranet portal makes it a much more user-friendly tool for communication and collaboration. The additional options in terms of live information and dashboards helps generate the rich user interface and up to date content that most of us are used to nowadays from current computer technology.  Additionally the user interface of the portal can become a valuable tool in communicating your hospital's identity to the employees. It can become the source of information for your hospital with things like employee directory, information about locations, services offered, physicians specialty and accreditation, calendars, and employee benefits, just to name a few. That becomes a draw for people to look at the information there. But is that enough?

There has to be a better pull to utilize this tool. The start would be to expand your portal to include links to your frequently used business applications. Tools like Helpdesks, e-forms, employee surveys, discussion boards, assigned tasks, vendor management, and dashboards are just a few examples of how the portal can be used by hospitals to maximize portal use. Another great way to use the portal would be for process streamlining, employee collaboration, and crowd sourcing. With open source and developer's kit becoming the industry norm, business streamlining solutions are no longer limited to canned versions provided by vendors and are extendable for your organizations needs.

Portal technology has enhanced the intranet from becoming a static tool with a document repository to a business tool for employee collaboration and process streamlining. The employee portal now provides you a space for communication across the employee base with ease and a greater reach than e-mail. The employee collaboration and business productivity tools provide the portal more cookies in the jar to get all your employees to use the tool and for the hospital to stay positive in your return of investment in the technology.

At Passageways we call our teammembers Pathfinders.  We put this little video clip together to show you what makes up a Pathfinder.

If you cannot see this video, click here.

This year at PowWow, we will have a live and interactive Twitter feed.  Nathan is here to tell you on how you can take part.

If you have trouble seeing the video, please click here.

Have YOU voted for America's Best Portal Page?  If not, get out there, take a look and vote!

No idea what I'm talking about?  Check out this link! 

It continues to amaze us how creative and innovative our customers continue to be.  The ways that they use the Passageways platform to collaborate and communicate internally is simply amazing.  But, in addition, the way that they put these pages together and design them in such fun and artistic ways blows me away.   Some time back, we decided that we wanted to find a way to share these pages with others.  This would allow our customers to get their creative juices flowing and see what other customers are doing..... as well as show our prospects and communities the endless possibilities of what can be accomplished using Passageways.  As an added incentive, maybe it should be a fun and engaging contest..... and the winner should get a prize.  Who doesn't like a prize, right?  The latest craze?  An Apple iPad.  Certainly this would appeal to everyone.  Right?  And with that, the America's Best Portal Page Competition began!

Our goal in establishing this contest was to allow our customers, and even our non-customers, to share their favorite and best designed portal page (or "Pages", as some of the organizations entering the contest couldn't pick just one, and submitted multiple entries) with us, our customers, prospects, friends, family, etc.  So, we started soliciting for entries.  Immediately the excitement around this was huge, and we even had several people who used the two-week entry period to create NEW portal pages that they could submit.  (I like to think that it's just because they like using their portal so much that creating new pages is FUN..... but I'm sure that the iPad increased the desire to have America's Best Page, too!)  At the close of the two-week period, we had 45 entries!  WOW!

The images were compiled and organized, and a survey was created to allow the viewers to vote on their favorite.  We decided to use QuestionPro online to create the survey.  If you've never seen this software, and have a need for surveying/polling/testing, you should check it out.  It's a quite flexible software, and viewing the results is simple, simple, simple!  I can log in at any time and see a snapshot view of who is in the lead, and who is close behind!  (And believe me, the votes are REALLY close!  However, I'm not sharing the rankings until next week!  I wouldn't want to ruin any surprises!)  On Wednesday of this week, we pushed out an email to our customers, giving them the details on how to view the entries and vote.  We also encouraged them to pass this along internally, externally, to anyone and everyone that they thought might be interested, or who would like to vote!

And it worked!  In the first 30 minutes, we had 250 views.  After an hour, we had nearly 500.  At the end of the day, we had OVER 1,000 people who had viewed the slide show!!  I couldn't wait to check the progress this morning when I came in, and was pleasantly surprised to find that we had collected 592 votes, and had 1314 views!  We are accepting votes until Noon (Eastern time) on Wednesday.  The winner will be announced at our Best Practices Award Ceremony at our annual PowWOW Conference in Indianapolis on Wednesday evening.  (No, you need not be present to win, but I'm not going to guarantee you that the iPad won't somehow end up in MY suitcase home.  J)

So if you haven't already, get out there, view these awesome entries, and VOTE!  Pass it along to your friends, family and co-workers, and have them vote, too!  And if you won't be joining us in Indy next week, check the website to see the winning page!  J  AND, do you have ideas for other contests that we should organize?  If so, leave your comments and suggestions here!