Speaker Bios: The SCANA Story

Session 3 (Friday, 1:45 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.)
The SCANA Story: How to Build a World-Class Intranet on a Shoestring Budget

In an era of tight communication budgets and limited resources, significantly upgrading your corporate intranet with social media and other new technology, while engaging employees and satisfying their needs, may seem like an insurmountable goal.  This presentation will describe how SCANA, a South Carolina-based utility, created  “The Edge,” an award winning,  world-class intranet built on a slim budget, with only internal resources, through team-based innovation, cooperation, enthusiasm, determination, attention-getting promotion,  and close attention to detail and follow-up.

During this session, attendees will learn:

• How SCANA constructed a collaborative relationship with IT in applying SharePoint2007, and gained “grassroots” employee support through a careful and caring involvement process that included creation of a 300-member pilot testing group who got “VIP access” to the new intranet prior to launch for testing and feedback.
• How SCANA used research to drive the redesign of their corporate intranet, using employee survey data, card sorting sessions with employees and lessons learned from the redesign of their external site.
• See samples of SCANA’s intranet and learn how the company is beginning to use social media tools and listening programs to involve employees in the business, and how the corporate team decentralized content ownership by creating and leveraging a  community of site owners from across the business.

Christy Season

About Christy Season:
She manages SCANA’s intranet that reaches almost 10,000 employees and contractors. Season was the project lead and strategist for a complete redesign of SCANA’s intranet. The intranet was recently recognized by Nielsen Norman Group as one of the best intranets of 2010 – an international award. In addition to her role with the intranet, Season serves on a social media committee at SCANA.  Season is a graduate of Clemson University with a BS in computer engineering and MBA in e-commerce.

About Therese Griffin:
Therese Griffin was recently named manager of marketing and philanthropy at SCANA Corporation. Previously, she managed the company’s employee communications department for nearly 15 years. She had management responsibility and oversight for SCANA’s intranet redesign project completed in 2009..

Ron Hess

About Ron Hess:
Motiv8 Communications is a full service employee communications firm based in Florida.  Hess managed corporate employee communications at GE and other leading companies during a 27-year corporate career. His clients include many Fortune 1000 companies.