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.