British Telecom Manages Online Inquiries

By Jason Compton

June 15, 2001 — CIO — In the old days, British Telecom’s corporate library was not a place for the faint of heart. Imagine a large room stuffed with unfiled paper and reports, where everything was checked in and out by hand?and where 10 librarians frantically tried to keep up with the research needs of several hundred British Telecom sales, marketing and strategy professionals.

Analysts who didn’t want to wait for research to arrive via mail faced the daunting prospect of a trek to London to do the work themselves. Andrew Levy, a competitive programs manager for British Telecom (BT), says he used to sandwich visits in whenever he could, but it wasn’t a convenient trip for him. "We’re talking about making a 200-mile journey," he says.

These days, however, BT employees can’t afford to wait days for competitive intelligence. The company must quickly respond to stiff competition from a new crop of smaller, nimbler telecom upstarts?not an easy task for a business with deep monopoly roots. British telephone regulator OFTEL reports that as of June 2000, BT serviced a little more than 8.5 million of the United Kingdom’s 10 million business lines. That’s still a formidable share, but a far cry from the complete dominance BT enjoyed as recently as 1992, when the company controlled virtually all of the country’s copper.

So while the old BT may not have needed the service it calls "intellact," the BT of today certainly does. Intellact essentially takes many of the resources of the old research library, adds a few more sources, organizes them and puts the whole thing online, where it’s available to nearly 90,000 of BT’s 137,000 worldwide employees. "It’s used by BT people in just about every job function and at every level, including sales, service, marketing, the CIO and help desks," says Peter Woolf, intellact manager. For these employees, the Web-based system is their window to the world, offering data, news and research on practically every topic on the BT corporate radar. Intellact incorporates sources ranging from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to obscure regional telecom journals, as well as proprietary research from analyst companies like Forrester Research and Gartner. Between 2,000 and 3,000 daily stories are divided into 100 different topic channels, including roughly 40 competitor profile sites, 20 vertical market portals, and dozens of technology and regionally focused centers.

The System

Intellact evolved out of the corporate librarians’ need to get competitive information to the field as fast as possible. The group ran a paper-based news clipping service for competitive research but could support only a few hundred BT users. Searching for a way to get the word out to more people, the Information Resource Center (IRC) staff switched to a weekly e-mail newsletter in 1991. While it reached a broader audience, the e-mail service lacked interactivity. When the research moved online, the librarians?now intellact staff?finally realized their ambition of giving knowledge workers immediate and unfettered access to an entire library.