The British Columbia Automobile Association is planning to add wikis, executive blogs and enhanced forms with added functionality to an intranet used by 1,200 employees to cross-sell its products and services.

BCAA -- a provider of full-service emergency roadside assistance, travel and insurance -- deployed a portal last January dubbed OnRamp, a platform that made it easier for users to receive communications and be knowledgeable around portfolio offerings from different areas of the business.

OnRamp replaced an antiquated and "departmentally-structured" portal that suffered from inconsistencies in design between business groups, said BCAA's intranet manager Gary Carr. "For someone from travel to find something from membership, it was certainly beyond the point of frustration," he said.

"The front line was not getting the information they needed. There was no holistic vision in accessing information across departments," said Mallory O'Connor, senior information architect with Habañero Consulting Group, the Vancouver-based IT consulting firm that redeveloped and launched OnRamp after a year-long process of planning, design, implementation and data migration.

Besides a central repository for information on products and services, the portal functions as a delivery mechanism to disseminate corporate communications to employees, thereby reducing the monthly average of mass e-mails from 30 to five, said Carr. The new approach is much like receiving a daily newspaper where employees can receive news via different channels of choice, and even search in past message archives.

Other features include a discussion forum, staff listing (contacts, reporting structure, location), and a repository for corporate manuals, reports and customer information.

Although a BCAA survey of staff usage of OnRamp shows 69 per cent of employees report the portal helps them better do their jobs, "there was a real lack of apathy around the Internet as a business tool in our organization as a whole," said Carr of the project's initial days.

However, the mindset around Web technologies eventually shifted at BCAA, as it has with many customers that Habañero has worked with, said O'Connor, citing the right governance plan and training model as key to that shift. While gathering project requirements, it's important to factor in time to train future users so "when they get to the training session, they are ready to think of things in a new way," she said.

And although O'Connor has observed a lot of buzz around, and increasing interest in, Web 2.0 technologies as a business tool, she cautioned it must be applied with discretion to ensure it adds value to the business.

The best approach, she said, is to "take some of the technology that makes sense from current trends and apply it in a way that's smart for the business."