About EOS Group

EOS Group is a leading international financial service provider in the financial service industry. Established in 2000, EOS Group consists of selection of specialized companies aiming to bring together many years of financial experience in global and local markets. The group consists of more than 60 companies operating in over 25 countries. With headquarters in Hamburg, Germany the company boasts around 10,000 employees.

About demicon GmbH

demicon GmbH is a German based IT management consultant company. They are official Atlassian Platinum Solution partners and a partner of Refined. Their team of IT-experts and consultants possess many years of experience in concept development and implementation of customized Atlassian Software collaboration tools.

We spoke with Lars Bachmann, Head of Sales at demicon. Lars is interested in how social intranets benefit companies by providing a productive and innovative working environment. In particular, his interest is captured in the way Confluence facilitates innovation, communication and project management.

“Atlassian’s Confluence is more than a digital data base for knowledge management. It is an enterprise intranet – one place for all your team’s work – which creates a dynamic and productive environment. Spend less time hunting things down and more time making things happen. With Confluence you can organize your work, create documents, and discuss everything in one place.”  – Lars Bachmann

Background to the Project

In November 2016 EOS approached demicon for a digital collaboration solution and by the end of February 2017, EOS had a live working solution.

EOS have been using Confluence in some areas of EOS group since 2013. Until recently, EOS had a number of different intranet services in use, including their own company intranet service which had  a major relaunch in 2009. The main problem was that their company intranet was not optimized for collaboration purposes and they didn’t have a consistent platform in use across the entire EOS Group. In 2017 with direction from demicon, EOS reformed their social intranet, combining the company intranet system with Confluence and introducing a wholesome collaboration experience.

The Goal

For demicon, the overall goal was to create a solution that reflected the EOS Group values and culture and a solution that was in line with their digitalization strategy. The project involved merging internal platforms (Confluence and the company intranet) to provide a clean, social business intranet platform for all employees at EOS.

With 10,000 employees, collaboration is not an easy task but for EOS group, collaboration was an important part of the culture so they were determined to find a workable solution. EOS Group is open-minded, progressive and relaxed when it comes to their Confluence platform, impressive attributes for a company of this size. To paint the picture, thousands of blog posts are written by the employees and hundreds of spaces are used for working in teams and projects.

With this number of employees collaborating on a platform like Confluence, the challenge is to find a structure and navigation that works. The more content and knowledge that is preserved and shared on Confluence the more important it is to create a structure so that content can be found and used. Consequently one of the biggest challenges was to put the complexity of a working space for 10,000 employees into an information architecture that is both flexible and easy to understand.

We asked Lars why demicon decided to implement Refined for Confluence.

“Confluence out-of-the-box is a great product, however at enterprise level you will have to do a bit more – especially, if you want to gain a high acceptance and adoption for a digital workplace with excellent usability and user experience. Refined offers a fantastic toolset that makes it easier to create better information architecture for the user. Just to name a few of the great features: categories, sub-categories, different colour-schemes and individual dashboards. Refined is simply the best and a solid base if you want to improve your Confluence platform. As we became partners to Refined in the past couple of years, we have chosen Refined to work with.”  – Lars Bachmann