Today, the system logs 7,000 user sessions per day, with an average duration of seven to eight minutes?although some market analysts may literally live and breathe the service from punch-in to quitting time. Intellact hasn’t completely abandoned its roots either: 4,000 subscribers still get a weekly newsletter, and many intellact users also receive a daily e-mail briefing that summarizes the top 10 news stories in their defined areas of interest.

The core intellact news feed comes from Factiva’s Reuters Business Briefing Select. Although it’s not the only wire service available, BT prefers the vast library offered by Factiva. BT gets more than 250 sources from the Factiva news feed out of a possible 7,000 publications offered. (Factiva’s content is sourced from a large number of newspapers, magazines and news wires, which include Dow Jones and Reuters.) "We can cover requirements from Australia to North America and get anything from very specific U.K.-focused telecom research to something as broad as the global pharmaceutical industry," says Woolf. "It’s not perfect, it hasn’t got every single source you’d want, but in terms of its scope and flexibility, it’s very effective."

BT also licenses feeds from analyst companies such as Forrester and Gartner and incorporates proprietary research.

In conjunction with research arm BT Labs, the intellact staff designed and built the portal interface, integrated the outside sources with the primary news feed and incorporated a Verity search engine to drive both automatic sorting and manual queries.

Organizing Content

Every major topic?such as major competitors, industry customer groups and some technology areas, such as wireless?has its own page. Those pages are automatically populated by the news feed and BT’s content management system, but the intellact staff members organize the pages and give the really juicy stories top billing.

Woolf notes that the IRC team’s responsibilities shifted dramatically with the growth of intellact. Instead of sifting paper, they now must make educated judgments about what information is most important. "The team is now focused on categorization of content," he says. While the search engine does most of the sorting automatically, using search scripts that the intellact staff have defined and refined over time, the homepages for the news and research sections are still edited by hand. "[Editors are] responsible for liaising with customers inside the business, figuring out what their requirements are, dealing with external [research] vendors and then putting a portal page together which automatically posts the latest relevant research from each supplier," says Woolf. Each of the five site editors makes sure that vital reports are given prominent and long-term placement on relevant news channels, rather than rotated off automatically when newer stories arrive.