There's an interesting InformationWeek article about Vanguard Group, one of this country's biggest mutual fund companies, and a $10 million project to turn its employee intranet into a personalized, customized destination for information. The new employee intranet portal will be called, creatively, eVanguard. (MyVanguard must have already been taken.)

From InformationWeek:

Instead of being a broadcast platform to communicate messages out to employees, the intranet portal's now built around personalization, giving the company's 12,000 employees better tools to communicate with each other. Vanguard's also using the employee portal to test interactive tools that it can then apply to its client-facing Web sites.

Vanguard employees can use the portal to customize their site by creating access to their Lotus Notes e-mail, selecting news feeds and managing a calendar. The company expects to save $10 million through the project by 2009, according to the article.

While the project is not yet complete, eVanguard has already provided some early functionality, as employees can now manage their time-off and benefits, seek travel approval and collaborate with co-workers via e-mail and online document sharing.

The goal of the eVanguard project, it appears, is to leverage a few Web 2.0 concepts and technologies, such as social networking and Ajax, to enable employees to more easily collaborate with one another and gather data. And while that's all well and good, what struck me most of all is how Vanguard will be using the employee portal as a way to test out new interactive tools that it could later introduce on its client-facing Web sites.

The common knock on the insurance vertical is that it's usually last to the party when it comes to adopting new technologies. While sometimes those hesitations are for good reason, too often the industry's "risk averse" nature causes it to ignore up and coming technologies until it lags behind other areas of financial services.

While some insurers are exploring uncharted waters, many more are too afraid to leave the dock. Perhaps by creating similar initiatives to eVanguard, insurers can leverage their own employees to beta test Web 2.0 projects, away from public scrutiny.

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