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.