Streamline and enhance the way you work

Transcription

1 Streamline and enhance the way you work bt.com More Connections. More Possibilities.

2 A better way In the past businesses learned to work the hard way. They often operated with people in little islands, re-inventing every wheel because they didn't know what expertise already existed in the organisation. They had to have people travelling miles for team meetings, wasting days in the process, or replicating expensive knowledge resources in different locations in order to keep them close to the places they were needed. Information technology promised to change all this, and more. But because it's evolved so fast, systems and applications which bring local or specific improvements don't always work together, erecting new barriers even as they cut through the old. To build a truly collaborative enterprise, you need a different approach. You can change the rules. The right technology will transform your real assets, your productivity and competitiveness. By enabling effective access to the collective knowledge of your organisation, you can accelerate market responsiveness and product development; you can improve customer service; you can enhance skills and job satisfaction; you can attract and retain scarce skills by enabling people to work where they want and with who they want, and you can expect to reduce costs overall. You can do all this not through yet another piece of new and unproven technology, but by taking a holistic view of what you already have and do. And here BT can help.

3 Collective strength Management consultancy KPMG has estimated that 60% of employees spend more than an hour every day duplicating the work of other employees. Research group Gartner has suggested that effective management of collaboration and innovation can put you up to a year ahead of your competitors and can increase market capitalisation by up to 10%. 1 Gartner has also predicted that through 2007, 75% of enterprise productivity gains will be attributable to knowledge management and other knowledge workplace enhancements. 2 So where do you start? Perhaps you are already looking to reduce the cost of your service. Perhaps you need to upgrade its capabilities, or consolidate multiple servers or even multiple applications. Perhaps you are looking to create secure remote access to messaging and collaboration tools to enable flexible working. Whatever your immediate imperatives, and whatever the size of your operation, we can help you identify the right applications and solutions, with appropriate supporting infrastructure, ensuring that all working processes mesh with your needs and existing practices. We have partnerships with leading application and software developers in collaborative working, including Microsoft, IBM (Lotus ), and other content management, portals, directories and document management specialists. Through these partnerships we have acquired substantial experience implementing collaborative solutions in diverse and often complex environments. This is supported by our core expertise in building and managing secure and resilient communications networks. Our comprehensive solutions can address both simple and advanced functionality, bringing benefits at every level. Even basic aspects of functions like directory management can be costly, not least when cumulative inaccuracies mean that people must waste time tracking down colleagues. We can manage your corporate , taking on the complexity and cost of scaling the application to meet changing needs, perhaps as you add offices, or have people working on the move, or by implementing new functionality like instant messaging. We can give people simple access to shared workspaces online, so that teams can collaborate effectively across distances without travelling to meetings. We can help you develop an intranet that remains relevant and immediately useful to different workgroups, or secure extranets that deliver similar capability in collaboration with your strategic partners and suppliers. And we can help you implement online training, so that people can develop their skills cost-effectively, wherever they happen to be. We do all this while maintaining a single view of your organisation, ensuring that the different applications work appropriately together. We can manage any integration with existing systems, as well as looking after security issues and supporting all your systems with flexible resilience, service restoration and helpdesk options. 1 Gartner SPA "Knowledge Management Initiatives in Europe", Gartner 2002.

4 A portfolio for the collaborative enterprise Communicate has probably changed the corporate landscape like no other technology in recent years. It is not just a messaging medium. It makes it easy for people to exchange and compare documents. It leaves an automatic audit trail. It supports both group exchanges and one-to-one correspondence. But as has become embedded in what we do, it can impose an escalating management overhead. We can take that overhead from you. Through our relationships with Microsoft and IBM we offer the two leading corporate applications in a fully-managed framework. That means we host the applications on our secure servers, and are responsible for their maintenance, availability and performance. We handle all hardware and software upgrades on your behalf. Costs are based on the number of users, and because we have economies-of-scale overall costs to be significantly lower than an in-house solution. At the same time your managers retain full control over account and security administration. Our messaging solutions support group calendar synchronisation and task management, including advanced instant messaging and secure web-conferencing, which supports audio/video streaming and document/application sharing. Share Intranets offer a dynamic repository for an organisation s knowledge, but their effectiveness depends on the relevance of the data they contain. Your people need to be able to put new material easily and with minimal third party involvement onto the intranet, so its contents remain rich and up-to-date. With a content management system (CMS), content creators can drop new material into a simple form in a web browser. The system automates the presentation of the material within the pre-determined design of the intranet, requiring no further intervention from designers or editors (though you can of course impose editorial supervision where this is appropriate). Intranet solutions are good for storing knowledge but most enterprises will need interactive resources too. With a shared (and secured) online workspace, remote workers, partners and suppliers alike can easily exchange documents, communicate and brainstorm ideas and agree tasks or schedules. Our document management solutions also support effective team or project working, offering a repository for all project-related materials with automated version control. This makes it easy to share reliable and updated information from separate locations, as well as helping team members communicate and track project progress.

5 Locate Unless you can map the people and the knowledge in your organisation, these resources are effectively lost to the wider organisation. But that mapping is no trivial task. A large multinational corporation can often have more than a hundred directories, built over time to meet different needs within the business. BT s enterprise directory solutions will streamline and automate the maintenance of all the vital contact and identity data about people within your organisation. It can aggregate multiple directory systems into a single master system, as well as facilitating powerful and flexible searches for all users. Where an enterprise directory offers a clear view of your people, an enterprise portal brings your organisational knowledge into focus. The portal can bring together data from a wider variety of digital resources (not just a single intranet), organising the presentation of primary information and access to underlying resources through a single screen. Through password allocation the portal also allows you to determine which resources are made available to different user groups, including suppliers and even customers. Learn The collaborative enterprise is about managing the knowledge already within an organisation, but it is also vitally about developing that knowledge for the future. It s been estimated that some 50% of employee skills are out of date within three to five years. 3 Online or e-learning offers an valuable complement to more traditional training. It can save the average FTSE-250 company more than 7.5 million a year in training costs 4, as well as providing a more flexible (and often more suitable) environment for individuals working to enhance their skills and knowledge. Using proven e-learning management tools we can provide a secure online environment both for tutorial sessions (including live sessions), teaching materials and progress monitoring. We can help you introduce and manage all aspects of an e-learning programme, combining content development with a secure and robust technical environment and comprehensive support. 3 IBM Corporation 4 KPMG Consulting, 2001

6 Our collaborative experience Collaborative working became a business imperative for us in the early 90s. Historically and like most organisations at the time we had a culture of only limited knowledge-sharing. Re-organisation into some 40 smaller trading units promised to make us more flexible and responsive, but also threatened to diminish our collective knowledge assets. New tools including and intranets enabled us to resolve these pressures, creating an effective collaborative infrastructure, and also enabling us to pioneer flexible working. BT was one of the first European corporations to create an intranet (back in 1995). That intranet has grown exponentially and with content running to millions of pages is currently among the largest in Europe, with more than 200,000 users. It delivers annual cost savings of around 1 billion. We manage one of the top three Microsoft Exchange systems in the world. We have Europe's single largest remote workforce, with more than 60,000 workers enjoying a high level of workplace and time flexibility, and more than 7,500 home workers. Our own unified directory gets 10 million hits per month and saves us 88 million per annum. Because we have developed these capabilities for ourselves, we understand their demands and can help you achieve similar benefits. To complement our collaborative enterprise portfolio, we offer global communications solutions from highly configurable, embracing managed voice and data services to more traditional connectivity. We have the breadth of experience and resources to offer the best solution for your requirements, and wherever you want to work in the world. Nobody wants to work the hard way. Work with BT and you can choose the more productive, collaborative way. We can help you turn its promise into reality.

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