Untangling the web

How a consolidation of its disparate internet and intranet sites, along with the introduction of a centralised content-management system, is enabling more collaboration and improved business performance at BT Global Services.

BT Global Services (BTGS) recently integrated several disparate websites onto a consolidated internet and intranet platform. To support this integration, as well as to manage its online content and website contributors worldwide, BTGS has also invested time and resources in a centralised content-management system (CMS).

Company background
BTGS is a global provider of networked IT and telecommunications services and solutions, which help multi-site corporate organisations manage the complexity of business communication. Years of network experience, thousands of skilled professionals and continuous investment have enabled the organisation to develop the broadest network coverage in Europe, and to extend its reach across North and South America.

Today, BTGS is active in more than 200 countries across five continents. It boasts 20,000 skilled networking professionals and one of Europe’s most extensive internet- protocol-enabled networks.

Overview
When BT Ignite was being primed for a split from BT plc to become a separate entity (a move that never actually happened), it was awash with widely dispersed websites reflecting different divisions and countries.

These many diverse gateways were creating problems for employees in accessing information and navigating through sites. For example, if a sales executive wanted to find a case study online it was often a difficult and lengthy task. There were also a number of challenges as a result of the number of different BT employees contributing content and making changes to the various sites. Finally, there was a requirement within BT for every unit to present a single external interface for customers and partners.

To do this, while remaining at the forefront of the telecoms industry, a centralised CMS was needed to control website-content contributors and enable employees to access information easily and respond to customers quickly and efficiently.

This case study provides an overview of what was initially proposed at BT Ignite, which was subsequently folded into BTGS, what has since been achieved at BTGS, and the challenges that the organisation has faced along the way.

Prior to consolidation
Before the introduction of the CMS, there were many problems. The disparate websites created a tangled web of information with no single content management or search system acting as a support. Employees had difficulty finding the right information and tracking down the right contacts. As things stood, contacting the correct person within BT or tracking down important information required multiple telephone conversations. In turn, the sales and customer-service processes suffered. Employees and customers were not getting access to the detailed information that they required and service was suffering as a result.

The solution
An initial ‘web managers’ forum within BT recognised that a centralised CMS was needed to maintain the internet and intranet sites and provide simple access to knowledge and online applications. Furthermore, a CMS would enable content owners to take control of their own content without relying on a central web-development team. It would also assist employees in their day-to-day tasks, thus improving processes across the organisation. Using a CMS that managed both the external and internal-facing sites would mean that certain areas of content created in one place could be re-used on both sites. Therefore, costs accrued in this area would be reduced.

With these factors in mind, a solution was created with clear organisational and infrastructure objectives:

To provide the key point of contact between BT and its global customer base, improving service on an easy- to-use site;
Create intelligent workflow to promote a faster time to market for new content;
Track and document all individuals contributing content to the intranet and internet sites;
Improve content consistency and re-use across audiences and channels;
Lower the cost and time of site maintenance, through consolidation of websites and applications, and the use of more advanced process automation;
Reduce barriers to entry for new content editors, while improving the experience for existing editors;
Enable people who were not content editors, or did not know hyper-text mark-up language (HTML), to add new content;
Enable editors to create and manage content to more effectively meet the requirements of a constantly evolving organisation;
Target content to users and reduce the reliance on e-mail communications.

Project challenges
A number of issues were addressed during the implementation of the centralised CMS.

One of the key challenges was the design of the intranet site templates. Initially, a standard template and a dedicated homepage template were built with left-hand navigation, right-hand navigation and content that users could edit in the centre through a web-based HTML editor.

The top mastheads, incorporating global navigation as well as the look and feel of the whole site, were controlled by the CMS team and changes to these elements had to be requested through them.

The templates took several months to design and build. The supporting design strategy also meant that the template layout was designed to be fixed for a period of six to twelve months.

However, initial difficulties with navigation and brand meant that changes needed to be made globally across the whole site. Because of the initial template design, all pages were generated as flat HTML on the server and this meant any global changes involved a mass re-generation of HTML pages from the amended templates. This was counter productive to the project team’s day-to-day tasks.

There were also problems when senior decision makers requested significant changes to be made frequently to the homepage. Changes to sizes and requirements required a flexible system, and senior managers could not understand why it took so long to implement a new layout.

After two months the decision was made to look at a different and more adaptable approach – hand-coded HTML pages were designed for the homepages, with version controlling by the CMS. This meant that content and layout could be changed and updated quickly. The next step was to change all templated webpage content so that only the core content was output as extensible mark-up language (XML) data. The raw text in XML format (data inputted without any style) was submitted to the live server. Then, when a page was requested, this raw content was presented back to the user, merged together with a global style guide or presentation layer.

This means that when managing a big activity like a global re-brand, for example, the changes can be made through just one edit to the presentation layer, rather than re-generating hundreds of pages.

On the back of these flexibility challenges, the project team had to be very careful when managing the system design. Many parties within BTGS were interested in the implementation and this threatened to slow the process down. Strong project management was required to move the implementation forward and not delay the overall project because of one or two small components.

When the central CMS was in place, the next challenge was in the provision of training to the users who were editing content on the site. This proved to be an issue. As a rule, face-to-face contact is always the best technique to deliver any kind of training, yet this was not logistically possible. As a solution, the team created a Microsoft PowerPoint programme that included a tutorial to take the end-user through all the processes they needed to understand. Also, screen capture videos built in Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash were produced to show a simulated construction of a webpage using a template.

However, the training tool not only took two months to develop, but users with remote access could not download the larger files. In addition, the tutorials did not have any supporting audio, meaning that many users found them hard to follow. As a result, many lost interest in the training system and the overall objectives of the programme were not immediately met.

Today, the team uses the Microsoft LiveMeeting tool to deliver training – something that has proved to be much more successful. LiveMeeting is a system that enables a group of people to be logged on to a live, real-time presentation where the chairperson controls the session and is on hand to answer any questions. This means that training sessions have an element of human interaction and problems can be solved upfront.

The new system
The CMS currently manages the BTGS internet, intranet and various extranets worldwide. The intranet alone receives in the region of 25 million hits per month and it is the prime source of information for BT employees, regardless of their location.

The CMS enables more than 1,500 registered and trained system users to create and maintain content in a flexible and dynamic environment, which facilitates versioning, rollback, previewing and management of consolidated content and applications shared across all areas of BT.

It includes metadata and meta tagging, which enables BT to categorise content into different areas. This is currently up and running on the BTGS case-study site. Articles are tagged with extended data keywords and can therefore be searched in order to identify those that support key solutions, sectors and countries. An example can be seen in the screen grab (see Figure 1).

In addition to migrating content from other platforms into the centralised CMS, a number of extensive and powerful projects (listed below) have been undertaken to improve the CMS and to increase its value and availability to the growing content-editor population.

Integration of the CMS with Microsoft Active Directory for security
BTGS cross-platform security software was implemented in preparation for offering content editors the additional benefit of single sign-on.

Rationalisation of the intranet information model and migration
Content was re-organised so that BTGS could offer a more flexible and dynamic approach to content editors. This provides a model that is better suited to the rapidly growing environment and business requirements. This model has been recognised as best practice and will be deployed throughout the rest of BT.

Improved content-entry templates
The content-entry templates underwent an overhaul to make them more user-friendly and easier to adopt and learn. To deliver further benefits from the migration of content to the newly rationalised information model, the content-entry templates were streamlined and modified to store all subsequent content in XML format.

Conversion of all content from HTML to XML
All content is now stored and deployed in XML and only converted to HTML at presentation. This had the phenomenal effect of reducing the requirement for the presentation of more than 35,000 HTML files; to the storage, maintenance and deployment of approximately 16,000 templates XML files.

Development of a sophisticated presentation engine
The move to XML and the dynamic presentation of pages means that less storage space is required and not all HTML pages need to be stored. When a visitor to a site selects a page, the presentation engine will pull together all the required XML content and dynamically create the requested page. For content editors, this means that content needs to be entered only once, even if it is deployed to multiple pages.

Provision of virtualisation and previewing of all content in all formats
This release was the first of its kind within BT. It allows the editor to preview the content as they enter it in the template.

All content entered in HTML, XML, active server pages (ASP) and ASP.NET can be previewed on the virtualisation server, in the look and feel that will be applied at the final stages of the presentation to the page viewer.

Release a fully re-branded intranet
The conversion of all content to XML format gives the site owners the power to choose to re-brand and release the branding instantaneously. A project that would once have taken more than a month to achieve (in modifying all HTML content to apply a new look and feel) can now be finalised in less than a day.

Benefits following consolidation
BTGS now has single internet and intranet sites, supported by a centralised CMS that serves its entire employee base. The centralised CMS ensures that the look and feel of the sites is standardised and consistent across all of BTGS’ European, Asia-Pacific and US operations. Tools and applications are consolidated and shared across lines of business and ‘in country’ sites, while local site administrators and content editors take ownership of local content. The CMS facilitates the re-purposing of content with various templates for serving internal and external sites. This includes product information for the distributor portal, in addition to internal marketing and sales zones. Benefits have been achieved across the whole of the organisation.

Improved business performance
A recent employee survey found that the consolidated intranet has improved business performance in the following areas:

Helps BT employees to work more efficiently (84 per cent);
Makes work more enjoyable (58 per cent);
Encourages information sharing between employees (86 per cent);
Makes employees more self-sufficient (87 per cent);
Helps employees cope with the high volume of information (67 per cent).

Enabling of new or improved products and services

Includes interactive network-map tools;
‘Whizzkid’ online initiative – a dynamic Microsoft PowerPoint presentation builder enabling all sales teams across the organisation to customise their own customer presentations on-the-fly, using a library of templates and content from a central store.

Collaboration and teamwork between partners

Internal programmes, such as ‘My Customer’ and the ‘Challenge Cup’ are managed through online portals, with virtual teams working collaboratively to deliver tangible cost-savings and service improvements across the business.

Costs savings across the organisation

Employees can work from home more easily, resulting in reduced accommodation costs;
Online collaboration means reduced paper, administration, printing and communication costs;
There are fewer ‘directory enquiries’ calls thanks to the online directory;
Reduction in overheads and administration of HR enquiries.

Enhanced levels of customer service

Employees can now easily access detailed information, electronic brochures and forms, making it easier to meet customer requirements.

Increased accuracy in business decision making

Employees can easily access competitor and analyst information, assisting them in making informed deal-making decisions;
Employees also have access to detailed, product-specific technical information and case studies, which can help to support the sales process.

BTGS now has a CMS which provides content consistency, worldwide. A number of extensive and influential projects are also being undertaken to improve the CMS and to increase its value and availability to the growing employee base at BTGS.

Boyd Ringrose and Chris Smithers are, respectively, intranet development manager and intranet manager at BT Global Services. Both can be contacted by e-mail at: sarah.davey@bt.com.