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.