IBM’s intranet portal is one of my featured best intranets, and favorite intranets, at this year’s The Best of the Internet and Intranet 2005 presentation at the 2005 IABC International Conference in Washington, DC.

W3 is the intranet home page to IBM’s to approximately 300,000 employees worldwide. W3 is a key component of IBM’s “Workforce Transformation Strategy” that lists the following as key objectives:

·     Reduce complexity

·     Bring the marketplace inside

·     Drive individual control and productivity through new tools

·     Unlock the company's collective knowledge[1]

The complexity includes a proliferation of intranet sites that numbered nearly 10,000 in 1998 and now is approximately 5,000, more than 11 million pages, and a plethora of tools and applications.

W3 provides a single starting place for the workday that is personalized by the individual and profiled to their role in the corporation. Home page personalization features include Links, News, Stock Tickers, and What’s New.

A companion section to the home page called Working Knowledge serves up relevant content based upon their employee profile (geographic location, business unit, personnel role, etc.).

Working Knowledge is driven by a network of “cross-function, cross-unit Information Brokers or content advocates” that volunteer their contributions. These IBM brokers’ primary role is to understand and identify the relevant content needs for IBM's employee groups and delivering that desired content through working knowledge portal.

“It's searchable, and there is feature that allows you to create custom categories using key words,” say Michael Reiter, Managing Director of W3. “WK is organized by more than just topic. Content is delivered via the profile, so users can get information based on their job role, organization, location (site), country, geography AND topics of interest in the employee profile.”

“The end game is to create an ever growing, organized, searchable, archived resource of information specific to their assigned audience segments..”

The site features a wide abundance of productivity tools including:

·     E-meetings1

o        36,000 employees every month

o        Saves travel & setup costs

o        Combines instant messaging,
presentations, voice

·     e-learning1

o        48% of employee training delivered on the Web

o        $284 million in annual savings

o        200,000+ received education and training online

·     e-HR1

o        Employee sat from 40% to 90%

o        Health care enrolment

o        Performance measurement, skill & career development

o        Compensation, stock options, pensions, insurance

o        Time off, transfers, eldercare, adoption, community programs

Despite their size the results have been impressive:

·   80% IBM employees visit w3 at least once per day

·   Productivity savings estimate of $80.6 million

·   Every major web project potentially saves over $200K in develop & deploy costs

·   68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs

·   Employee retention: 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on w3

·   3 million page views per day on average1

READ MORE ABOUT THE IBM INTRANET:

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