1. The BT Intranet story

2. 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

3. 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
BT’s intranet has again improved when benchmarked by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum against global best practice in 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.

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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

10. 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

11. Thank you
To find out the latest achievements with BT’s intranet go to the BT Intranet manager’s blog