Tag Archives: BT today

I wrote a book about governance: ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’

Book cover - Digital success or digital disastersWhen an intranet loses its usefulness over time, and people become disengaged and end up working around it rather than through it, I often find that the strategy and governance have been neglected.

Even a strong and appropriate strategy will founder if the governance isn’t in place to execute it.

I see governance as the foundation of a great intranet, and by ‘great’ I mean an intranet that is useful, useable, and supports the organisation’s goals and people’s needs.

I often blog about intranet governance, but my brand new book offers a lot more than I could ever drip-feed via short posts.  Writing a book has helped crystallise my thinking around governance, and delve deep into my past experience as an intranet manager, and as a consultant.

Take a look at my book now – it’s called ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’ and I mean for it to be relevant to intranets, collaboration, digital workplace and mobile workspace governance, while focussing on intranets.

I’m so pleased to have it published through Intranätverk, it’s been great to work with Kristian Norling and his team.  Seeing the final book on my tablet has made the months of writing all worth the effort.  I’m thrilled to be able to offer you my experience, guidance, and tips and hope you’ll consider my book a toolkit to better governance and a better intranet.

Please take a look at what the book offers you and your organisation – this is a ‘business book’ that should help organisations of every size, but I also hope it’s of interest to individual practitioners and ‘lone intranet managers’. I think this book can support you.

* Digital success or digital disaster? – Book available now.

* Follow me on – let me know what you think!

Intellact: BT’s customer insight and information site

There are a few ‘killer applications and content’ which have driven the usage of BT’s intranet.  As well as the BT Homepage – our corporate portal, BT Today – our new sites and Directory – our people finder, Intellact, BT’s customer insight and market portal has been key to achieveing this.

Intellact provides a wealth of insight on the communications industry. Thousands of people in all parts of BT use these services to:

  • Help understand customer needs and satisfaction.
  • Monitor the global press – daily updates on business trends.
  • Support business propositions.

Comprehensive, up-to-date, high quality research helps people make their decisions with:

  • Business news
  • IT research and advice
  • BT commissioned market research
  • Broker research
  • Industry sector research
  • Internet audience measurement

Business news is updated several times per day on Intellact.  You can sign up to receive an email that reviews the days top news from UK and international newspapers, journals and newswires.

Intellact offers an unrivalled collection of published research covering ICT and other industry sectors with the option to contact analysts for further details. 

Intellact can be searched in various ways and you can set up alerts so when a new research is available you are informed so you don’t miss anything.

Intellact helps BT give people what they need for their business needs and a competitive edge to BT.

Have a look at these .

Get a great intranet by involving everyone

When I posted about the latest results for BT ‘BT Intranet 2010 benchmark results‘ I promised to give examples the Intranet Benchmarking Forum highlighted as global best practice.

The first example was about our content.  IBF said all pages across BT’s intranet contain author and date information.

My next example is about how involving everyone can make your intranet more valuable to your organisation.  IBF said BT’s intranet supports our values to be open and straightforward in dealings with colleagues.

BT’s intranet builds on this by supporting collaboration with anyone in BT including senior managers.  We do this in several ways with online chats, blogs, and collaboration tools including:

  • Blog Central now has over 500 blogs with over 80% having posted at least once in the last month
  • BTpedia now has over 2,500 wiki articles with new articles added every few days and the top article having over 125,000 views
  • Podcast Central now has over 1,000 podcast episodes with over 20 added in the last week
  • On our newsdesk site, BT Today can express their views on BT-wide subjects that anyone can add to as well as comment on news stories.
  • BT’s CEO, Ian Livingston, has regular online chats where anyone can ask a question he will respond to for about one hour.

The social intranet at BT

The presentation that may never be heard or seen!  

I was invited by the Quadriga University in Berlin to present on the social intranet at BT.  Sadly the travel disruption caused by volcanic ash means it has been cancelled until a later date in 2010.

With the development of social media tools, intranets have become more than a depository of information and established themselves as platforms of dialogue.

:

I hope you find it of interest online without me talking about it.

The future for BT’s intranet?

At the end of 2009 I posted about BT’s intranet being 15 years old and the progress made in that time.

BT’s intranet has constantly evolved to meet the changing needs of the business and how it best helps people to be able to do their work as effectively as possible.

BT’s intranet has always aimed to be simple and easy to use.  People use it to complete an activity such as a room booking, check the latest news and more recently, publish and use opinions and views with people that have the same interests across BT.

So what’s my view on its future for 2010?  It’s likely to see BT’s intranet:

  • become even easier to use, wherever you are – at home, coffee shop or BT building – whenever you want to and with any device – your PC, BT’s computing kit or mobile – and the real difference will be the experience will be the same.
  • ease of use will also mean you won’t need to keep authenticating to use applications and content protected behind passwords.  Just login once and then loading up your browser will give you faster access to what you need.
  • people will find it as easy to publish content they want to share or own as sending an email and be able to search for all the different types of information on BT’s intranet from one search page that gives you what you need.

Maybe these are not earth shattering aims?  But I know if I can help achieve any of these people in BT will benefit more from using our intranet. 

And that’s what my role as BT Intranet manager is.

BT’s intranet is 15 (yes, 15) years old

Just before Christmas 15 years ago a few grey pages appeared and flickered away on a computer screen in BT for the first time.  

What began as a small pilot project to look at the problem of “information overload” has led to being one of the best intranets globally with everyone in BT using it.

It’s now such an intrinsic part of the way that the company does its business that it is hard to imagine business life without it.  A BT person now uses the information network for a variety of tasks at work and also works with processes and systems which are intranet based.

 These include ‘killer applications’ at the start of our intranet that I have posted about before – BT Homepage, Directory, BT Today and more recently social media tools like Blog Central, BTpedia and Podcast Central.

Information and activities supported by the intranet include sales and marketing data, fault resolution, service planning and provision, facilities management, human resources support, senior executives’ sites and business intelligence.

All our key BT-wide applications most people need to use are online – whether booking a room, claiming expenses, ordering a PC, performance marking or training – saving time, paper, effort and transforming costs.

So what about the future?  I can’t predict for the next 15 years but I’ll post about the next 15 months soon.

BT today – BT’s great intranet news site

I’ve mentioned in previous posts BT today as BT’s main intranet news site for the latest news affecting everyone in BT.  But I don’t feel I’ve given it full justice until now.  The problem is where to start as it has so much to offer!

BT today was one of the first sites on BT’s intranet when it was launched in 1994.  It meant people could find out the latest news, whenever they wanted to and reduced the overload (and cost) of information being sent to everyone each day.

Since it’s launch BT today has been one of the most popular sites on BT’s intranet.  BT raises several tens of thousands of pounds from digital advertising on the site.  It has now grown to include:

I’ve shared some for you to see these.

Along with BT Homepage and Directory, the BT today news site is one of the key sites that encouraged people to start using the BT Intranet.  Offering a wider range of news services has encouraged people to use it more, and more frequently.

Future plans include more use of photos for each story, larger photos where suitable for stories and people able to comment on each story.