Strategic Consultancy - Redhouse Lane Communications

The European Investment Bank : Strategic Consultancy

Previous project

How EIB is breaking down internal boundaries

Challenge

The European Investment Bank is under constant pressure to perform - as a Triple A rated financial institution and as a European role model. And it is underconstant scrutiny - by civil society and its stakeholders. So internal communication takes on a special importance. Not least because the Bank is facing rapid change: changes to its operating environment both within and outside the Bank, an evolution of its role in financial markets, and the blurring of traditional boundaries between its internal and external communications. It needed new and better ways to share knowledge and information between its different directories and to enhance efficiency.

Our response

We focused on the Bank's chief communication and knowledge sharing tool: its intranet. As in many companies, the intranet, flavour of the 90s, has become an evolved mass of different ideas, platforms and sites, each with its own distinct design and architecture making information difficult to find. We interviewed internal stakeholders and users about their experiences of the intranet, to gauge the gap between what it needed to do and what it could do. To bridge that gap we audited the intranet page by page, flagging issues like broken links, duplicated or dated content, and readability issues.

Our findings helped us to recommend:

ways to improve user journeys and cross directorate co-operation

new universal naming and labelling conventions

improved tagging and indexing schemes

imposing a more consistent style and structure.

Result

The European Investment Bank accepted our recommendations and gave us the go-ahead to put them into practice.

With a staff complement having all 15 languages of the 27 member states of the EU, the European Investment Bank faces many interesting communication challenges.