It’s the early days for the “Knowledge Center” at Proximus, Belgium’s largest ICT provider, but their new insights platform is integral to the digital transformation currently underway at the firm. The Knowledge Center works to support Proximus’ ambitious goal: “to open up a world of digital opportunities, so people live better and work smarter,” says Luc Rooms, Head of Market Intelligence.
For Proximus’ insights team, the platform also helps meet an additional objective: “to strengthen the team’s role as a privileged partner in their clients’ digital transformation.” Though the platform is still in its early days, Luc says the Knowledge Center has already helped facilitate a needed culture shift within the organization, a shift towards the breakdown of silos, more open communications, and more collaboration between teams.
The challenge: siloed thinking and needs-based information flow
Luc says their SharePoint situation had reached its limit of capabilities, and it was simply not future proof enough. It mirrored a control-like approach, Luc says, a work culture influenced heavily by “needs-based information flows,” siloed thinking, and excess confidentiality.
Luc says in order to reach their goal of working smarter while transforming digitally, it’s key for Proximus to become an organization “where the exchange of ideas is acknowledged as a key strength within the company,” but they needed a powerful, agile insights platform to support their work.
The solution: The Knowledge Centre, a single place to find, share, and re-use insights
After a successful soft launch to a group of about 3,000 decision-makers, Luc says they rolled out the Knowledge Center to the rest of the group—roughly 13,000 people.
They paired the launch with the activation of Proximus’ new corporate intranet, positioning the two systems as complementary tools working in tandem. The Knowledge Centre is now an in-depth platform for market, competitive, and customer information, “one single place to find, share, and re-use insights,” Luc says.
The team developed the Knowledge Center in a phased approach after conducting 30 in-depth interviews with stakeholders to assess their insights needs. First, the team installed knowledge zones that focused on fundamental, baseline information for their stakeholders, such as information on domestic and international markets, competition and benchmarking.
Then, they added “role-based use cases,” targeting the needs of 12 specific internal roles covering leadership to salespeople. Finally, they added “topic-based use cases,” meant to dissolve the lines between role-based inquiry with interdisciplinary topics, like gigabit networks, 5G, sustainability, and Covid-19. And in just one day since its launch, the team already saw high engagement and received requests to develop more knowledge zones.
The result: A shift in culture at Proximus
“We can really say that there has been a shift in culture,” Luc says. “We played a pivotal role in that by opening up content to more and more people.” The Knowledge Center leverages the “wisdom of the crowd,” Luc says, finding the balance between democratizing Proximus’ insights and implementing necessary role-based levels of access and confidentiality.
The platform’s matrix of topics and knowledge zones shift stakeholders’ thinking away from role-based needs and towards thinking in an interdisciplinary, team-oriented way, in line with Proximus’ strategic goal of a network-thinking and a collaborative approach to insights. “We crossed some bridges with the new platform, and now we can inspire more and more colleagues with the company’s insights.”