The BT Intranet story Why an intranet Initiated

The BT Intranet story

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

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

Benchmarking BT’s 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.

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.

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

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 organisation’s 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

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

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

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

Thank you To find out the latest achievements with BT’s intranet go to the BT Intranet manager’s blog http: //markmorrell. wordpress. com/.