The BT Intranet story

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The BT Intranet story
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Why an intranet?

• Initiated back in 1994
• Information overload
• Valuable information being produced, but
• not shared, communicated, targeted or managed
• Group Communications own intranet strategy
• Business led, not technology led!
• Corporate wide information network established

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The benefits

• Retrospective 1st year benefits of 305m
• Directory alone was 88m
• Culture change
• Empowerment
• Flat communications
• Freely available information
• Organisational change
• Virtual working

4
Benchmarking

• BTs intranet has again improved when benchmarked
  by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum against global
  best practice in 2009. It is now the top
  intranet overall and for each of the quadrants
  assessed
• strategy and governance
• communications and culture
• performance and metrics
• design and usability.
• This confirms the intranet user experience is
  even better with people spending less time
  finding what they need for their work and it
  being of greater value.

5
Financial value of an intranet

• BT measured the exploited and unexploited value
  of our intranet in terms of the business
  processes it delivers.
• Three main types of business value
• cash saved and revenue generated
• time savings converted into cash
• less tangible benefits such as risk reduction,
  increased satisfaction and emissions savings.
• For every 1 invested there is potentially 20
  exploited value achieved and 5 unexploited value
  still to gain.

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Critical success factors

• Focus on information, NOT technology
• duplication of data (effort) was removed
• Information was seen as legitimate
• Information was seen to be up to date
• It was easy to navigate find right information
• BT opted to devolve authority to content owners
• No imposed standards for layout or style
• Exponential growth and huge diversity of sites
• Self regulation by lines of business to
  establish consistent look
• Centrally established standards for management
  of information

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Information vision

• The Intranet enables people in BT to access the
  information and services they need to do their
  work at any time, from any place.
• information to be easily accessible, timely,
  accurate and relevant, and appropriate to their
  business situation and needs
• consistency between information and the
  organisations desired behaviours and values
• location and time not to be barriers to accessing
  and using information
• to receive information through the most
  appropriate media
• to exert choice and control over the information
  they receive
• information to add value
• their changing requirements to be met in a timely
  fashion

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Content types

• Formal
• for many, authoritative, well managed,
  reliable.
• All standards are mandatory
• Team
• for a defined audience, owned by a team, with
  shared responsibility for editing, requiring a
  managed environment.  
• Most standards are mandatory
• Crowd
• community owned, open environment, for anyone
  to edit and contribute, light governance and
  low levels of trust.  
• Some standards are mandatory
• Personal
• opinion based, owned by an individual, light
  governance, open to a wide audience.
• Some standards are mandatory

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Intranet governance model

• BT Intranet manager strategic, standards
  setting, role
• Content owners own and publish content
• Line managers approve and act on escalations
• Central set of templates set best practice,
  prevent errors
• Standards and training set best practice,
  educate publishers
• Tools check and remove non-compliant content
• Intranet site and helpdesk online help for
  publishers

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Summary

• We started in 1994
• Information vision, not technology
• Business led, communications own
• Applied central control where needed
• Dont measure ROI across whole intranet
• Everyone in BT has access
• Helped to change culture way of working
• Business critical system
• Ever evolving

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Thank you

• To find out the latest achievements with BTs
  intranet go to the BT Intranet managers blog
  http//markmorrell.wordpress.com/.