Tinker Federal Credit Union: the answers staff need to serve a member, in one place

Tinker Federal Credit Union (TFCU) has served its members since 1946, when a group of civilian employees at Tinker Field in Oklahoma founded it. Its branch and member-service staff, lenders and back-office teams work under state and federal regulations. To answer a member correctly, they need the current policy, procedure or product detail at the moment the question comes up.

Their intranet, TFCU Today, had grown into a library that was hard to search and manage. Critical content was buried in long PDF manuals, the same information lived in more than one place, and changes went through IT. TFCU wanted one source of truth for training, for serving members and for compliance audits.

Starting from what staff use every day

TFCU led a content and service inventory with our support: the branch operations, lending, compliance and HR manuals, product information, forms, reports and the internal applications staff open every day. Each item was recorded with a short description for lists, a full description and who it is for, which became the content model.

From PDF manuals to pages people can search

Much of the content moved from PDF to web pages: the auto loan underwriting guidelines, for example, became a page in the Lending Manual instead of a file to download. A taxonomy of topic tags lets search and lists find each item, and a later round of search tuning ranks matches in titles, summaries and keywords first.

The right content for each role

We built myTFCU on IBM WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager with our Portal Blueprint, our component framework for employee portals. The home page carries news, events, quick links, the people directory and search; the Workspace gives each person dashboards and a directory of the tools and content for their role; and each department, from HR to lending to the branches, has its own site. Content lives in one place and appears wherever it is relevant.

Owned by the business, not IT

Authors create content from templates, and approval workflows route each item to the owners of its site or topic. Over three days of training, TFCU’s authors learned to publish, promote content to their site’s home page and use workflows, and administrators learned to manage sites and templates. Links and PDFs are not pasted into pages: each is registered once as a resource, with its own description and audience.

Growing with TFCU

From 2016 to 2018 we kept extending the portal: IBM Connections for collaboration, with single sign-on, comments on portal content, and the search tuning that puts the best matches first.

myTFCU replaced TFCU Today. Staff find a policy, a procedure or a product detail in one place, see what matters to their role on their dashboard, and each department keeps its own content current, with approvals built in. TFCU gained one shared source for training, member service and compliance audits.

TFCU kept working with us through 2018. We designed and built the portal, trained its authors, and extended and supported it after launch.

After launch, a TFCU employee put it this way:

“Having all information regarding a single topic in one centralized location lowers the research time and allows me to provide a hassle-free member experience.”