The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly. The agency is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide and its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. It strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily, integrate locally or to resettle in a third country. In more than five decades, the agency has helped an estimated 50 million people restart their lives. Today, a staff of around 6,300 people in more than 110 countries continues to help over 32 million persons.
The Business Requirement
The UNHCR intranet is used by over 1,200 staff in Geneva, and in more than half of UNHCR's field offices - approximately 200 locations, reaching at least 4,000 staff outside of Headquarters. The time zone span ranges from Canberra and Tokyo in the East to Washington D.C. and Caracas in the West. Branch office connections ranged from fractional T1 lines to 18.8kbps dialups, and in extreme cases through portable commercial satellite telephones. Many offices in locations with poor host-country infrastructure connect via UNHCR's private PAMA satellite network.
The UNHCR wished to embark upon a major redesign of the intranet in order to improve the dissemination of information throughout the organisation, to encourage the use of the intranet as a primary channel for knowledge management, to act as a gateway to repositories of structured information and to provide universal access to portals into other enterprise systems.
The Sigmer Solution
As the first step in the redesign, the UNHCR Intranet Services Unit in Geneva retained Sigmer Technologies as a consultant with proven experience in planning intranet redesign projects and in the selection and utilisation of content management systems. Sigmer worked with the Intranet Services Unit to develop a comprehensive project plan identifying major activities, tasks, dependencies, time lines, and resource requirements for the redesign of the UNHCR intranet and the implementation of a CMS.
The Sigmer solution delivered a comprehensive project document for the redesign of the UNHCR's intranet and the implementation of an appropriate CMS. The project document clearly identified major activities, tasks, dependencies, timelines, resource requirements, and identified risks and gave mitigation strategies for the redesign of the UNHCR's intranet and the implementation of a CMS.
To achieve this Sigmer utilised its proven methodologies for:
-
Establishing functional requirements for the site redesign
-
Establishing functional requirements for a CMS
-
Conducting a market product survey for a CMS including the evaluation of candidate products, and a thorough scope/gap analysis
Sigmer also advised and consulted on the use of a CMS as part of a broader Knowledge Management strategy and, separately, reviewed PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal v.8 and identified potential integration points with the redesigned intranet generally, and with a selected CMS in particular.
The Result
The UNHCR now have a comprehensive approach for the redesign of the intranet and the UNHCR Intranet Unit are now in a position to accurately define major activities, tasks, dependencies, time lines, and resource requirements.
