KMDA employees more involved thanks to new portal

“With Office 365 and Cegeka’s ‘Connected Organisation’ vision, KMDA has introduced a system for centralising information and making it transparent within the organisation.”DRIES HERPOELAERT - ALGEMEEN DIRECTEUR KMDA

The Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp (RZSA) is one of the largest not for profit organisations in Belgium. In 2012 it asked IT partner Cegeka to sort out its internal communication. Now KMDA is looking even further ahead.

Evolution to a different mindset

Now that the communication processes have been sorted out, KMDA wants to improve collaboration between its various departments. So people have to learn to share information, and this was a bit tricky to start with, which isn’t unusual for companies switching over to a new way of working.

SharePoint Online helped optimise collaboration within departments, so the next step is to improve inter-departmental collaboration too. KMDA and Cegeka have already created templates and project sites so the technological collaboration can run smoothly. But in order to ensure that people don’t continue to think only within their own departments, a different mindset is required.

Work in progress

Project managers have been trained to think from an inter-departmental perspective, but this doesn’t extend to all our employees. So a change of culture is required, and our people definitely see the added value of this. With Office 365 and Cegeka’s ‘Connected Organisation’ vision, KMDA has already introduced a system for centralising information and making it transparent to the organisation. Every employee will ultimately make their own contribution,” explains Herpoelaert. In a Connected Organisation, it is of course necessary to make as much information as possible available to as many people as possible, although there are some sections that are screened off too.

Connected Organisation

“Cegeka’s Connected Organisation vision, supported by SharePoint Online technology, has resulted in some notable changes in our organisation. Clear and effective top-down communication has led to employees feeling more involved, and this in turn has led to more bottom-up communication. Our operations run more efficiently now, our communication is more transparent and more effective, and our employees are happier too.

The internal collaboration of course relies on employees, but SharePoint Online provides us with lots of technical possibilities and there’s definitely more willingness too. We’re very happy with the software and our collaboration with Cegeka. We won’t hesitate to grow this relationship with more new services too,” says Herpoelaert.