Ericsson Group Function is the colossal infrastructure unit of the cellular telecommunications giant Ericsson with 100 million subscribers on 100 networks. With some 25,000 employees, mostly engineers, Ericsson Group is a large, challenging environment of passionate and intellectually driven knowledge workers.
Like most large companies, Ericsson Group’s intranet evolved in a scattered, free-for-all approach with many groups developing their own intranet site their own way, with their own technology, and without any enterprise standards or collaboration with other groups and entities. Ericsson’s biggest intranet challenge was rationalizing a fragmented content, style and platforms set-up across the organization.
In fact, the free-for-all intranet created a grossly bloated network of 4,000 intranet sites representing more than 4-million pages.
Ericsson’s intranet goals focused on developing a centralized platform and standards, and finding scales of economy and cohesion across the enterprise. In 2003, Ericsson Group took the first steps towards a single intranet and platform by rationalizing (shutting-down) many intranet sites and standardizing content development, design and navigation. Instead of 4,000 sites and 4+ million pages, the new intranet is limited now to just 80-thousand pages.The rationalization and standardization program led to triple-digit ROI and savings in the millions of dollars.
Despite a successful rationalizing, like many other successful companies that have blazed such a trail with their intranet, additional problems persisted on the Ericsson intranet:
- End users continued to complain about the difficulty finding information
- IT complained that the infrastructure was too complex, expensive and difficult to maintain
- The business maintained that more processes needed to be ‘webified’ with more support for sales, and greater cost savings
- Publishers complained that publishing through the CMS (Interwoven) was too complex and time-consuming
In order to address these challenges Ericsson moved to an integrated web philosophy and a centralized portal platform. “Through this integrated, single portal platform, web customers, partners and employees get access to specific content and functionality based on their profile,” says Mats Renee, Director of Marketing Communications and head of the intranet for Ericsson Group Function.
The new Ericsson portal (powered by IBM’s Websphere) is a personalized intranet based on employee profile, role, business unit and location. Other benefits include:
- The portal encourages re-use of content where input fields (tags) are based on the editor’s profile
- Content can be published once and re-used in multiple areas (powered by Interwoven Teamsite)
- The organizational structure is no longer ‘hard-coded’ in the portal, which eliminates the need for painful content migration efforts
- Users can find needed content more quickly with access to selected content and tools based on the user’s profile
- Role-based content access also increases security
Instead of organizing the intranet by the company structure the intranet is now grouped intuitively for employees by eight major categories:
- Workplace
- Products & Services
- Sales & Marketing
- News & Events
- Projects
- Support
- Unit Info
- Employee Info
The portal is owned by Ericsson Group Communications, but the governance is decentralized and split according to area:
- Channel strategy and design
- Web platform and technology
- Category management
Marketing communications owns the design and strategy, and IT owns the technology. The content however is decentralized so that while Marketing Communications owns the content strategy and standards, each group and content author owns their own content while using the centralized platform to manage the content.
To launch pages on the intranet, all content owners and authors have to adhere to strict standards that are outlined in some detail on a governance site called WebCOM. WebCOM details all the necessary information for creating and managing pages including technical, security, editorial and design standards for Ericsson. Everything a content owner/publisher needs to know about the web is detailed on WebCOM including:
- Launching a website
- Maintaining a website
- Shutting down a website
- Rules and directives
- Guidelines
- A-Z Glossary
- FAQ
- Training
- News
- Help (Support)
The intranet has a balanced scorecard that tracks its performance on several levels including ROI, brand and user satisfaction. User satisfaction is measured at least once per year and averages a 3.5 out of 5 (70%).
While developing a successful intranet has taken years and mountains of effort, Mats share some of the key lessons from the evolving experience of:
- Focus on the low hanging fruit
- Rationalize and consolidate where possible to streamline the platform and organization
- Take an incremental, pilot implementation approach rather than big bang implementations
- A significant amount of money can often be saved by stopping all initiatives that are not in line with strategy and roadmap (e.g. through Governance support process)
- Align budgets/projects with all stakeholders involved in executing the roadmap(s)
- Balance revenue generating and cost saving initiatives based on ROI analysis
A key to Ericsson’s intranet success is the support and involvement of senior management. “As in any change management program you need senior management support,” adds Mats. “And from the migration point of view, we did not get up to speed until we have a commitment from them.”
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