Integrating a Newly Acquired Business into a Company Intranet
Textron
AMER | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2024
Overview of Textron’s approach in granting – and communicating - intranet access to employees of newly acquired businesses, defining personalization and mapping overall content strategy.
-
We are about to kick off our first ever SharePoint intranet festival for the US and we will welcome Chris from Textron. So we actually met Chris at the intranet reloaded event in Los Angeles, in LA, Long Beach, this year. So Kai was actually on a roundtable with Chris and loved Chris's story so we asked Chris to come and join us today.
Yeah, what I really fell for was the Textron business and how it has grown. So I'm so delighted that you can join us, Chris. Great, I'm really excited to be here, thanks for having me.
Can you see my screen okay? Yeah. Okay, great. Sorry for the technical difficulties, but like I said, I'm glad to be here.
My name is Chris Spilker. I'm the senior manager of digital and brand communications for Textron and part of my role includes being a liaison between our intranet stakeholders from our business units and functions and our development team. So I've been involved in our intranet for several years and before I kind of get started about discussing my main topic, which is how to integrate newly acquired businesses into an intranet, I'd like to give you a little bit of background about Textron, about what makes us so unique and how we solve some of these issues with our intranet.
So Textron, we're a multi-industry company. This is our boilerplate. We leverage our global network of aircraft, defense, industrial, and finance businesses to provide customers with innovative solutions and services.
We're probably the biggest Fortune 500 company that most people have never heard of. We do rank 318 on the Fortune 500, but we've been around for quite a while. Matter of fact, last year we celebrated our 100-year anniversary.
We actually started out in 1923 as a small textile company and over the years started acquiring different companies, finally divesting ourselves from textiles around the 1950s, and today we're known mainly in the defense and aerospace sector. So we're comprised of a lot of different business units and you may recognize some of our most powerful brands. For instance, under our Textron Aviation segment, that includes Cessna and Beechcraft Aircraft, and also a host of other businesses under that segment that do aftermarket parts and service, and service our existing customer base of aircraft.
We also have a business segment called Textron eAviation, which is brand new. This segment was established just over a year ago when we acquired a company called Pipistrel, and Textron eAviation, its mission is to manufacture light aircraft, electric powered aircraft, which is kind of like the newest thing in the aviation industry. So that's kind of our foothold in that business.
Okay, awesome. Well, as I was saying, we're comprised of six main business segments. Bell Helicopter is probably one of our more recognizable brands.
We also have an industrial segment manufacturing everything from easy-go golf cars to fuel tanks from our Caltex business. We also have Textron Systems, which develops and manufactures and integrates products and services for the U.S. and U.S. military government and customer customers, government customers. And we also have a finance segment, which is primarily responsible for financing Textron eAviation and Bell Aircraft.
So just to add to the complexity, we also are in more than 20 nations. We're all around the globe. We have a global workforce that speaks a total of 15 languages, four of those languages, which are kind of core languages, English, Spanish, French, and German.
So as you can see, we are a complex organization, but I'd like to share a video just to kind of show you some of our products in action. So with that in mind, you can see we are a rather complex organization. We've got our hands in many different industries supporting all kinds of different products and customers.
So how do we cobble this all together in an intranet? If I can advance to the next screen, I'll show you. Hold on. Where I left off is we are a whole bunch of business and brands, and how do we cobble that together into a common intranet experience for our employees? Here's our solution, ERIC.
That's our intranet. It stands for Enterprise Information Resource Center, and if you're an employee at one of our different businesses, you see a different view of ERIC. So for example, on the far left, you'll see an example of what I see as a corporate employee of Textron, but if I were a Bell employee, I'd see the view of ERIC that you see in the center with a Bell-branded color scheme.
Likewise, if I'm part of Textron Aviation, I kind of see a view of ERIC branded with that business, but you'll notice that the structure and the layout is all the same. So we use a SharePoint back end to actually publish content to our intranet via a web front end, and you'll see that all of our businesses have a common information architecture, yet it's just branded for the employee's resident business. Our intranet features a combination of business unit specific and content published by the Textron Enterprise.
So you'll see that we have, you know, what we call portlets throughout the intranet, and via SharePoint, we publish content that's relevant to our audiences. So I can see what's happening at Bell right here in the center. You'll see some news features just from the Bell Enterprise, but if there's something company-wide going on, we can also publish something from the Textron Enterprise into this area as well.
So it really lets us deliver communications that the employees need to see from their respective business, but it also gives Textron the ability to publish out enterprise communications via our intranet so that our employees can go ahead and see what they need to see. So how do we do that? How do we personalize our intranet content? It really all comes from the data that lives in our human capital management system. So all of our employee data, including what business they belong to, their employee number, whether they're an employee, contractor, manager, non-manager, that all lives in our human capital management system, which several hours a day is synchronized via Microsoft Identity Manager into various Active Directory groups, which actually feeds into dozens and dozens of different systems, including the SharePoint groups that we use for our intranet.
And these Active Directory groups, they're mapped to what we call personalization facets and values that we use to tag content in the intranet. So kind of on the SharePoint backend, it looks something like this. When we're publishing content, we have all kinds of options to target the content to our various audiences.
So, for example, I can pick and choose my business or operating unit, what we call country compensation, which is the country that the employees draw their pay and benefits from. We can even tag a person if they're a member of a specific bargaining unit or if they're non-union employees. We can target based on employee status.
Even if you're a non-employee, we can target contractors. We can target by location where the actual employee is based from and several other different values. And the cool thing is we can actually combine all of these values into like a unique audience.
So I could publish something on intranet that only managers, say at Bell, working in our Amsterdam supply center would see. So there's literally hundreds and hundreds of different combinations we can come up with using the scheme to tag content. What that ends up looking like is I'm a corporate employee based in our Fort Worth, Texas office.
So we do have some personalized content for corporate Fort Worth employees. It looks something like this. This is an example of joining some of our local resource employee resource groups.
So I can put a main feature here in our news portlet. And if you click on to read the full article, it kind of looks something like this. So that's kind of what our employees are used to.
And that's how it pretty much works across the board here at Textron. So what does that mean for acquisitions? Now that you understand how we're structured as a company, you can kind of see we're a conglomerate. We're a portfolio of businesses and acquisitions have been part of our DNA since our founding.
So some notable acquisitions we've had recently is True Simulation and Training. That was a business we actually created as a result of acquiring two competitors of each other, merging them together with some existing employees from another business and creating a brand new brand and business. That happened back in 2013.
One of our biggest acquisitions that we've made recently was in 2014 we bought Beechcraft. Beechcraft and Cessna Aircraft, they're both based in Wichita, Kansas. And literally for decades, they've been fierce competitors, not to mention crosstown rivals.
You know, about 10 years ago or so, things were pretty bad in the general aviation aircraft market. Beechcraft was going through some tough times. Textron acquired them, merged them with their arch rival Cessna, and we formed Textron Aviation.
That was really challenging, not just from an internet standpoint, but from a culture and employee standpoint as well. But they are now known as Textron Aviation and they're fully integrated. We also acquired some other businesses, including ATAC, which does military training, Arctic Cat Snowmobiles, Howl & Howl, which is part of our Textron Systems business, Pipistrel, which went in to form our new e-aviation segment with electric aircraft.
And our newest acquisition announced just last week, Amazilia Aerospace, which is actually based in Germany and is now part of our Textron e-aviation business. So here's kind of the flow of events as it happens once the acquisition is announced. So we'll have the announcement come out.
The deal may not have closed yet. We may just have an announcement. There will be some time between that announcement and the deal closing.
And during this time, if all continues to go well, an integration team will be formed representing business unit and corporate functions like HR, finance, contracts, legal, communications, etc. We'll go ahead and form an integration team to talk through the planning and how this is going to work. We determine the integration timeline that also drives employee communications and the need to access our intranet, Eric.
So when the deal finally does close, usually a welcome message is sent to the new employees. And during that time, I work with our HR and IT folks to gather details about how this newly acquired business is going to be structured within our human capital management system because that's going to drive our Eric intranet strategy. So working with those partners in HR and IT, you know, I analyze that data.
I ask questions like, will this acquired business be slotted into an existing business? That will determine what view of Eric the new business will receive. How many employees are there? What are their largest facilities? Do I need to create new active directory groups to represent these facilities? What countries are they in? Is it a country we don't, you know, do business in now? Do I need to create a new country active directory group? And also what languages do they speak just for communication purposes? Sometimes we don't have to do all this. Sometimes the acquisition relatively straightforward.
An example is over the past couple of years, we've acquired some service centers in our Bell and Textron aviation business units in Australia. So these new employees were automatically slotted under those businesses. We actually already had personalization values created for Australia.
So once they came onto our intranet to tag content to them, all we had to do is select their business unit and the country Australia, and they were ready to go. So sometimes it doesn't require a lot of work. Sometimes it requires a lot of work.
As far as gaining intranet access to these newly acquired employees, they're going to need access to Eric right away. One of the first things we ask them to do is ask their HR folks to actually access our human capital management system to create employee numbers, get these employee profiles built, which then in turn will actually create active directory groups to allow them access to the intranet. Right away, they're going to need to know our enterprise and business unit policies.
They're going to have to make sure they follow compliance procedures and anything that their business requires they do to remain compliant, including taking compliance modules. If they're U.S. based, they're going to need to get into Eric to access their online pay stub advice because payroll is one of the first things that tends to cut over after an acquisition. So until they're actually integrated into our internal network, they use the external facing version of Eric so they can actually log in using their login credentials, username, and password.
So we'll send them out an email telling them how to establish their first time intranet access and who to call for help in case they ever forget their password or need help logging into the intranet. We also provide a little bit of communications around cybersecurity, how to keep your password safe and out of the hands of hackers. But it doesn't end there.
After initial intranet access, integration activities continue on for months and even years. Some ongoing activities may be integrating the business with company culture and communications processes. We're going to roll out additional enterprise tools.
For example, we have an enterprise employee recognition program. We'll roll that out to them and tell them they can find it on Eric. Their business may have some specific applications and tools they need to use.
We'll go ahead and roll that out and tell them where to find it on Eric. We may bring those facilities onto our internal network, in which case they no longer have to log into the external facing version of our intranet. But that may or may not happen.
Maybe it's too expensive to do that. So instead, we may just Microsoft their Microsoft 365 tenant to our tenant just to let them collaborate more easily with us. But they'll still be accessing Eric from the outside, from the internet.
We get a lot of questions sometimes about what do we do with these newly acquired businesses intranet. And the answer is as varied as how we approach an acquisition itself. Sometimes it's a small business we acquire that doesn't have an intranet.
And the whole concept of an intranet is brand new to these employees. Sometimes, like in the case of case of Beechcraft, where it's a larger company, they do have an intranet and they may use it for a time. But I found that over time, as their functions start to become intertwined with their acquiring businesses functions, they kind of, you know, re-evaluate their processes.
They kind of take on the acquiring business units way of doing things. And sometimes their intranet just becomes irrelevant after a death. But sometimes we take the best of that acquired business and kind of integrate some of that content into some of our department sites and, you know, take on some new processes that, you know, might actually, you know, work really well.
Sometimes they'll come to us and say, hey, you know, this is a brand new function that exists in this newly acquired business. How do we get our presence out on Eric? So we can actually spin up a new sub-site and get a new department site running, train some Eric intranet publishers and get them published out on Eric too. So we just kind of, you know, play it by ear, keeping in mind that when we acquire a new business, you know, some of these folks are, you know, really got a lot on their mind besides the intranet at the outset.
You know, they're working on integration, you know, legal stuff, sales and marketing, and we don't pressure them to get on Eric right away with their content, but when they do come to us, we're ready to help them. So putting it all together, what are my key takeaways from my experience in working with some of these mergers and acquisitions in the intranet? My key takeaways are this, step up and lead the intranet side of an acquisition. No one else is going to do it.
And if you know your intranet like the back of your hand, you're the logical person to do it. You may make some mistakes along the way, but mistakes can be reversed and corrected. I've also learned that when dealing with colleagues from the new business, get to know them, be empathetic, understand what they're going through.
Sometimes they're fearful, they don't know anything about the company that acquired them. Sometimes they're grateful and excited and anything in between, but just be their ally and just be there for them. You may act as a human switchboard to kind of connect them to the right people they need to get things done and that's fine.
It's always great to have new friends at a new business. My other takeaway is find your go-to person in each function and be their go-to person in your function, whether that's at the newly acquired business or in one of the functions you're working with during the integration, because you're probably going to work with these people again at some point and building that trust is really, really important. And finally, after you've done this a time or two, create a merger acquisitions internet playbook so you can document your process.
If for nothing else to help you during your next acquisition, or if not to actually pass on to someone else who's going to carry the torch when your role is over. And my saying is, if you've done it more than twice, it's a process and if it's a process, it needs to be documented. So in a nutshell, that kind of sums up what we do with an acquisition and our internet.
And if there's any questions, I'd love to take them at this point with the time we have remaining. So Chris, that was great. I've only ever worked on one joint venture acquisition and that was intense.
So you've actually done quite a few. So well done to you and the team. We've actually got a lot of questions.
So I'm going to ask a couple of questions and then if you wouldn't mind just going into the Q&A and hanging about and just answering some just because there's so many. So I think one of the questions that came up quite a lot is what version of SharePoint are you using? And is it out of the box? Is it just straight out the box SharePoint that you're using for your intranets? It's not straight out of the box SharePoint. We've customized it quite a bit so we can actually get this personalization working.
Our version of SharePoint right now, I'm kind of embarrassed to say, we're in SharePoint, I think it's, is it 2010? But we are right in the middle of upgrading to 2016. So we're leaping ahead into the 21st century with that. So yeah, we've customized it to the point where it's almost unrecognizable SharePoint.
And I suspect as well the on-prem piece needs to be because of the security and things like that. So then if you're using on-prem and you're moving to 2016, I don't know someone's asked question about the hubs. Do you use hubs? I suppose you, because that's the SharePoint online world, isn't it? The hubs and the online sites.
Yeah, we can't, we can't use SharePoint online because of the way our Microsoft tenants are structured. We have some defense businesses and they have to be on government cloud for Microsoft 365. So we have to use a SharePoint on-prem solution just so we can all, you know, all the publishers can access it no matter what tenant they're on.
So that's one of the main reasons why we're not on SharePoint online for our intranet. Yeah, of course. And one quick question, I'm just going to find out, because I was curious to know about this, the audience tagging setup, was that developed by tech sponsors? Was that working with the IT team department to get the tagging right? It was.
We actually developed this about 10 years ago during intranet redesign. We had been running our intranet for about, you know, four or five years before we redesigned it for the first time. And we kind of sat down and said, okay, what's working, what's not, let's figure this all out.
And we just went through months and months of just trying to figure out, you know, what a perfect world would be with audience tagging. And I think we've arrived at a really good solution. It's held up really well.
And, you know, it's pretty, it's pretty easy for us to integrate these new businesses just based on the scheme that we set up. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Well done.
Thank you, Chris. Thank you for your time staying. Thank you for sharing your story.
Yeah, if you can go to the Q&A and answer, that would be amazing. And if, Chris, are you happy to, people connect with you on LinkedIn as well, because I think there are going to be, there's a lot of questions there for you. Certainly, I'll put my email address in the chat as well, but feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or, you know.
That's amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Meet the speaker:
Chris Spilker
Senior Manager, Digital & Brand Communications
Textron
