Quelle: CIO USA
In the old days, British Telecom´s corporate library was nota place for the faint of heart. Imagine a large room stuffedwith unfiled paper and reports, where everything was checkedin and out by hand---and where 10 librarians franticallytried to keep up with the research needs of several hundredBritish Telecom sales, marketing and strategy professionals.
Analysts who didn´t want to wait for research to arrive viamail faced the daunting prospect of a trek to London to dothe work themselves. Andrew Levy, a competitive programsmanager for British Telecom (BT), says he used to sandwichvisits in whenever he could, but it wasn´t a convenient tripfor him. "We´re talking about making a 200-mile journey," hesays.
These days, however, BT employees can´t afford to wait daysfor competitive intelligence. The company must quicklyrespond to stiff competition from a new crop of smaller,nimbler telecom upstarts---not an easy task for a businesswith deep monopoly roots. British telephone regulator OFTELreports that as of June 2000, BT serviced a little more than8.5 million of the United Kingdom´s 10 million businesslines. That´s still a formidable share, but a far cry fromthe complete dominance BT enjoyed as recently as 1992, whenthe company controlled virtually all of the country´s copper.
So while the old BT may not have needed the service it calls"intellact," the BT of today certainly does. Intellactessentially takes many of the resources of the old researchlibrary, adds a few more sources, organizes them and puts thewhole thing online, where it´s available to nearly 90,000 ofBT´s 137,000 worldwide employees. "It´s used by BT people injust about every job function and at every level, includingsales, service, marketing, the CIO and help desks," saysPeter Woolf, intellact manager. For these employees, theWeb-based system is their window to the world, offering data,news and research on practically every topic on the BTcorporate radar. Intellact incorporates sources ranging fromThe New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to obscureregional telecom journals, as well as proprietary researchfrom analyst companies like Forrester Research andGartner. Between 2,000 and 3,000 daily stories are dividedinto 100 different topic channels, including roughly 40competitor profile sites, 20 vertical market portals, anddozens of technology and regionally focused centers.
The System
Intellact evolved out of the corporate librarians´ need toget competitive information to the field as fast aspossible. The group ran a paper-based news clipping servicefor competitive research but could support only a few hundredBT users. Searching for a way to get the word out to morepeople, the Information Resource Center (IRC) staff switchedto a weekly e-mail newsletter in 1991. While it reached abroader audience, the e-mail service lackedinteractivity. When the research moved online, thelibrarians---now intellact staff---finally realized theirambition of giving knowledge workers immediate and unfetteredaccess to an entire library.
Today, the system logs 7,000 user sessions per day, with anaverage duration of seven to eight minutes---although somemarket analysts may literally live and breathe the servicefrom punch-in to quitting time. Intellact hasn´t completelyabandoned its roots either: 4,000 subscribers still get aweekly newsletter, and many intellact users also receive adaily e-mail briefing that summarizes the top 10 news storiesin their defined areas of interest.
The core intellact news feed comes from Factiva´s ReutersBusiness Briefing Select. Although it´s not the only wireservice available, BT prefers the vast library offered byFactiva. BT gets more than 250 sources from the Factiva newsfeed out of a possible 7,000 publications offered. (Factiva´scontent is sourced from a large number of newspapers,magazines and news wires, which include Dow Jones andReuters.) "We can cover requirements from Australia to NorthAmerica and get anything from very specific U.K.-focusedtelecom research to something as broad as the globalpharmaceutical industry," says Woolf. "It´s not perfect, ithasn´t got every single source you´d want, but in terms ofits scope and flexibility, it´s very effective."
BT also licenses feeds from analyst companies such asForrester and Gartner and incorporates proprietary research.
In conjunction with research arm BT Labs, the intellact staffdesigned and built the portal interface, integrated theoutside sources with the primary news feed and incorporated aVerity search engine to drive both automatic sorting andmanual queries.
Organizing Content
Every major topic---such as major competitors, industrycustomer groups and some technology areas, such aswireless---has its own page. Those pages are automaticallypopulated by the news feed and BT´s content managementsystem, but the intellact staff members organize the pagesand give the really juicy stories top billing.
Woolf notes that the IRC team´s responsibilities shifteddramatically with the growth of intellact. Instead of siftingpaper, they now must make educated judgments about whatinformation is most important. "The team is now focused oncategorization of content," he says. While the search enginedoes most of the sorting automatically, using search scriptsthat the intellact staff have defined and refined over time,the homepages for the news and research sections are stilledited by hand. "[Editors are] responsible for liaising withcustomers inside the business, figuring out what theirrequirements are, dealing with external [research] vendorsand then putting a portal page together which automaticallyposts the latest relevant research from each supplier," saysWoolf. Each of the five site editors makes sure that vitalreports are given prominent and long-term placement onrelevant news channels, rather than rotated off automaticallywhen newer stories arrive.
If users can´t find what they´re looking for on the editedtopic pages, intellact provides a straightforward search pagethat can search on keywords, time frame and sources---eitherby individual source, category (such as news or outsideresearch) or the entire intellact database. The search enginethen ranks and summarizes the results. BT currently licensescontent for six months, which Woolf says is a good balancebetween saving money and having access to importantinformation.
Neither BT nor Factiva would disclose the total or ongoingcosts associated with intellact, and any ROI analysis fallsinto the anecdotal category. Woolf says he has heard a numberof stories over the years in which intellact is credited withproviding the necessary details to expedite or close aparticular deal or capture the attention of a certaincustomer. For example, he cites a company survey in which oneaccount director reported his sales team generated 1 millionpounds (about US$1.5 million) in new business by usingintellact briefings. The most compelling hard ROI thus farcomes from a 1999 survey of intellact users, conducted aspart of an ongoing internal marketing campaign to boost thesystem´s popularity. The 800 respondents indicated thatintellact was saving them a total of 12 full-time employees.
The Future
Last October, intellact was moved out of BT´s U.K. Retaildivision and into the enterprisewide Business Servicesunit. According to BT Business Services CIO Tudor Rees, theswitch in jurisdiction reflects an appreciation forintellact´s role in the company´s international portal. Inpart, it also made it easier to market intellact as acomponent of BT´s knowledge management offerings, from whichBT´s line-of-business CIOs choose when planning their ownslate of resources.
Until the switch, intellact users were essentially enjoying afree ride on the research and technology funds theU.K. Retail division spent on the system. The move toBusiness Services ended that scheme, and intellact nowcharges the BT groups it serves. So far the charges are beingslowly phased in, but the ultimate goal is to get the usersto completely fund intellact´s operations.
The call for cash has led to a counter call for more contentselectivity. When intellact was operated gratis, nobodycomplained when Woolf´s staff added another news feed. Now,however, division managers are starting to get sensitiveabout closing the gaps between what they pay for and whatthey use. Accommodating those selections seamlessly is stillan open problem for intellact.
With a workable revenue model in place and a popularinformation destination behind it, why keep the money flowingstrictly within the family? BT is giving some thought tosharing the fruits of its information-gathering labors withan inner circle of suppliers and customers---for a fee, ofcourse. "Over time, we believe the service may have potentialoutside of BT," says Rees.
Rolling out intellact far beyond BT´s staff will likely haveto wait for an overhaul of the system, planned for later thisyear. Among the projects is a replacement of the Web layoutand personalization engine developed by BT Labs. The teamalso plans to expand the range of Internet-based sources,offer distinct page designs to different BT divisions andoutsource the responsibility for managing and maintaining theserver hardware. A multilanguage interface and livetranslation of content are also possibilities.
While the upgrades will be welcome, users like Levy reallylove intellact for its instant access to information; in theend, that´s enough to make the system worth its weight incopper (twisted pair wire, of course). "I like to work whereI can almost give same-day service to queries," saysLevy. With intellact "the information is there, and it´senough to enable us to make the right decisions."