Executive Summary
You may already be investing in an intranet. Will it pay? This white paper provides business case calculations that will help you decide. It also covers the latest developments in intranet evolution and helps you determine where your company stands in comparison.
Your intranet is only valuable and economically viable if your employees visit it frequently and routinely obtain vital information. What they gain from the intranet are the substantive facts they need to proceed with confidence. Because employees spend less time searching the Web and proprietary sources, they can take action without second-guessing their decisions.
This white paper also discusses a solution for adding world-class global news and business information to an intranet: Factiva Publisher. Using this out-of-the-box solution, content managers can filter news so that your intranet becomes the preferred current awareness service for your employees. Online usage reports are provided so that you can measure user interaction and the return on your intranet investment.
Introduction
Intranets typically start out as a central repository for internal corporate information. Intranet managers post company policies, employee program information, employee contact information, press releases, cafeteria menus, and memos from department heads.
There' no question that this activity reduces the cost of printing and distributing paper documents. But intranets, as with all things Web, are bottomless content pits. Every department will want to post its own news, views, and memos. In some cases, you' ll be replacing documents that would normally be printed. But in other cases, you'll be posting material that used to be sent as an e-mail attachment or was simply not distributed company-wide before your company built an intranet. The more content you have, the more resources you will have to devote to posting, refreshing, deleting, storing, and managing that content.
To get full value out of your intranet, you will move from the one-way communication mode, where you are simply publishing material, to an interactive and collaborative environment. Employees will be able to explore pension plans and calculate their retirement options. They will update their own contact information and travel schedules. They will have online discussions about certain projects. All of these activities cost money to build and maintain, but they also save the company money in the form of reduced administrative and operational workloads, improved levels-of-service, and higher employee productivity.
Strategic News on the Intranet...
How Departments Benefit
Intranets provide cost-effective ways for companies to meet specific needs of an organization. Adding a content feed and an article archive to your intranet can add more value to each of these functions.
Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing personnel must be appraised of a large volume of continually changing information on products, pricing, and services. But these facts are irrelevant if they do not appear in context. Questions that can be answered by an intranet that delivers external content include:
What issues are our customers facing?
Is our company keeping up with the competition?
What new deals have our competitors done recently?
What are the editors and analysts saying about us and our competitors?
What new trends are emerging in the marketplace?
Who else has attempted what we' re attempting, and how did they fare?
Finance
Your finance people must keep an eye on markets and government actions, all over the world. A content feed can help them:
Keep track of companies in which they have an interest, for investment, merger, or acquisition purposes
Understand which companies are being funded and/or going public
Keep up to date on legislative actions and accounting trends
See what the press is saying about your company and competitors
Manufacturing
The manufacturing managers in your company are constantly looking for ways to increase output, improve quality, and reduce costs. They can use a content feed to:
Learn how competitors are achieving their goals
Find suppliers, around the world, who could provide back-up or outsourced manufacturing, design, distribution, soft-ware, employment, or general consulting services
Read about the latest trends and methodologies
Stay up to date on governmental regulations
Discover new sources of materials and parts
Customer Service
Customers expect your company to offer professional, well-informed customer service. An intranet content feed can:
Keep your customer service managers aware of the latest customer service techniques and technologies
Expose them to strategies that are working for other companies
Show them what other companies are doing for their customers and how customers are responding
Reveal negative stories as well, so they can take the proper corrective measures
Calculating ROI:
Paper documents versus an intranet
One of the most direct ways to calculate the value of an intranet is to compare the production costs of a company document, such as an employee manual, to its distribution onto an intranet. The following example builds the business case.
The printed version: $8,000 (U.S.) a year
An employee manual with three hundred pages, at 3 cents a page, sent to 300 employees per year, costs $2,700 per year to print, excluding the binder. The cost of creating the artwork, not including the writing, would run about $10,500 (assuming 1 hour per page, 300 pages, of a production artist' time at $35 per hour, including overhead). This cost would be repeated, year after year, as changes had to be made to the document. We can say that the total cost, over a five-year period, would be $40,000, or $8,000 per year.
The intranet version: $3,225 a year
Assuming you were dedicating a server to your intranet, you d be paying a one-time cost of $7,000 to $10,000 for the server. You d also have to get the employee manual converted to HTML and posted onto the internet. We can assume that it would take 15 minutes per page. A web production artist, at $35 per hour, including overhead, would then cost $2,625. Once the data was entered into the intranet, there would be no more reprinting or distribution costs. Taking the worst case, we would factor in the one-time cost of a high-priced server ($10,000), the one-time cost of converting to HTML ($2,625), and an ongoing maintenance and updating cost of 25 hours a year at $35 an hour ($875). The total cost would be $12,625 for the first year and $875 for the next four years, at a total five-year cost of $16,125 (or $3,225 per year).
This is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison; we did not include binder costs in the printed versions or the cost of maintaining an intranet, which is impossible to quantify because it would be shared across a variety of activities. However, we can still safely make the argument that significant savings can be realized in the publishing of corporate documents.
Calculating ROI:
Clippings and subscriptions versus an intranet news/research service
As you know, in order to keep employees well informed about the competition, industry, and business trends in general, department budgets include thousands of dollars every year for subscriptions to publications and reports.
In addition, many professionals and departments subscribe to clipping services, where articles are clipped and/or copied from printed publications and sent to the company. The cost of a clipped article was typically $1.50 (U.S.) per article. Let' look at how much it cost to copy, distribute, and file these articles in a typical situation.
Assume that we are getting 50 articles a week from a clipping service, and distributing them to 10 executives.
As we said, the articles are $1.50 each, so 50 articles a week would cost $75 per week, or $3,900 per year.
A clerk who does the copying and distribution work is making $25 an hour (including overhead). He spends 42 minutes copying the 50 articles for 10 people (500 copies at 12 copies per minute), and another 15 minutes or so organizing the copies for distribution. We can assume that he' spending an hour a week. The cost of the clerk' time is consequently $1,300 per year ($25 x 52 weeks).
Assuming the copies cost $.03 each, the copy charge would be $780 per year (50 articles x 52 weeks x $.03 per copy x 10 people).
The total cost of distributing these articles to ten executives would be $5,980 per year ($3,900 + $1,300 + $780)
Of course, our example assumes only ten executives are allowed to see this information, while other employees are making recommendations and decisions without the benefit of these relevant articles.
Imagine if all 300 employees in a company had access to these articles.
Our clerk would be making 15,000 copies every week (300 people x 50 articles)
The clerk would spend about 21 hours a week making copies (at 12 copies per minute) and another 3 hours, conservatively, organizing the copies for distribution, for a total of 24 hours. The clerk would consequently cost $31,200 (24 hours x 52 weeks x $25 an hour).
The clippings would still cost $3,900 per year.
15,000 copies at .03 each would cost $450. Multiply $450 by 52 weeks, and you would be paying $23,400 for the copies.
The total cost of distributing these articles to the 300 employees would be:
$31,200 + $3,900 + $23,400 = $58,500 per year.
You may be thinking that this scenario seems completely unlikely. However, it is a valid like-to-like comparison, since a content feed installed on a corporate intranet gives every employee access to the information that was previously only available to a privileged few.
Of course, hard-copy clipping services are quickly becoming an anachronism in our electronic age. There is a great deal of inefficiency in a process where a story was written electronically and then printed, cut out, attached to a small tab of paper identifying the publication, copied, and mailed to a company, then copied and distributed to others.
Obviously, these clippings cannot be searched electronically at a later date. They can only be filed away, and chances are good that they will not be referred to again, even if someone in the company could use the information. They also cannot be sorted by word, subject, company, publication, or date, as they would be if they were in electronic form. In other words, the information has no value beyond the initial absorption by the busy executive.
An intranet content feed satisfies this need for organization. As one intranet manager said recently in a telephone interview, "Having a news provider like Factiva to keep everyone informed on a variety of topics of interest, and being able to group them into main categories, as well as to give them the opportunity to go in and do their own search for news, has been really invaluable." An intranet content feed provides the equivalent of a relevant clipping service.
It can also replace many of the subscriptions that your company pays for. Paper publications tend to pile up as people optimistically hope they ll get around to reading them. But in fact, employees are falling behind on the latest industry news. While they can get some information from Web-based sources, the trade publications often do the best job of providing "in context" and "in-depth" articles that help employees make better decisions.
People also move to other departments, and their subscriptions don t follow them. An intranet content feed solves both of this problem. The intranet keeps up with employee movements. Wherever they are, even while they re traveling, they have access to the same information as everyone back at the office or in headquarters.
As you replace subscriptions with an intranet-based content feed and library, you can save your company anywhere from $35 to $150 a year, per person, on subscriptions. These savings should be part of your intranet ROI calculations.
With clippings, you never know what people are reading. But an intranet content feed service with monitoring capability will help you learn what employees find most valuable and also prove readership levels to management.
The content feed solution that you select for your intranet should be able to help you answer these questions, conveniently and immediately. For example, Factiva Publisher includes a graphing function that will show you activity by day, folder, and article. You can determine which topics and articles result in increased usage, and which types of topics and articles can be eliminated from the feed. The system consequently becomes more useful over time.
Armed with this information, you will be able to graph usage and demonstrate the popularity of the system to management. Being able to say, "50% of our employees are reading an average of 10 articles per day" makes it possible to compare the cost of supplying that information via an intranet to the cost of supplying it using other methods.
Third-party models are also available to measure loyalty and ensure content is meaningful and organized properly, such as the model created by Outsell, Inc. (outsellinc.com), an information industry research and advisory firm.
Increasing ROI: Using a content feed to make your intranet more valuable and cost-effective
Because your corporate intranet will naturally grow over time, with more content and functionality required by corporate users, the most effective way to recoup your intranet investment is to add valuable content or make content more valuable with minimum human intervention. An automated solution will increase intranet use while decreasing intranet costs.
One way to add external content is to create do-it-yourself posting capability, using forms and systems that enable employees to modify existing content or post new content. Forms can be created from scratch, or you can use commercial website content updating tools such as Mediasurface or Macromedia' Dreamweaver. There are also portal solutions, such as Oracle' Web DB3, that help you build an enterprise information portal and combine content from both internal and external sources.
How efficient is the Web as a research tool?
The Web is the place to learn what people are selling. An archive of proprietary news sources is the place to learn what people have done and what they have learned.
For example, if you were to use a web-based search engine to find out what' happening in the intranet marketplace, and typed in "intranet," you would get 1,307,927 sites. Most of the sites would be companies that provide intranet consulting, software, content, or measurement services. You would have to go through each site to see what people are saying about their companies and their services.
Several hours later, you still wouldn' t have read a single article that summarized the current state of the intranet marketplace. You wouldn' t learn, for example, which companies were successfully using
the intranet as a competitive advantage and what kinds of resources they used. One well-researched article from a newspaper or trade publication would provide this information in a few minutes.
The average revenue per employee in a Fortune 100 company ranges from $1.79 to $2.55 per minute. An employee who spends an hour browsing the Internet and receives irrelevant information has wasted more than $100 of his/her potential to generate revenue for the company. Receiving news that is pre-filtered, or conducting in-depth research from an article archive, can significantly reduce the
amount of time required to obtain desired information. The employee, armed with this information, can then make decisions and take action, moving quickly back into revenue-generation mode.
Factiva over-the-shoulder research, where Factiva product developers actually observed hundreds of executives working, revealed that most business people spend as much as 40% of their time preparing documents for presentation and distribution. For this reason, Factiva Publisher includes post-processing tools that speed this process, including the ability to preview an article for printing or saving, send articles via e-mail, and maintain a personal archive.
Online usage reports enable content managers to adjust their editorial strategy to reflect employees' needs.
Another way to add valuable content, with a minimum of intervention, is to automatically feed highly targeted news that is chosen precisely for its value to your employees. This turns your intranet into a current awareness service, and brings new relevance, immediacy, and importance to your content. Instead of simply being a strictly "internal" resource, information about the marketplace becomes an integral part of your intranet.
This news can be fed into your intranet environment in a variety of ways, depending on your network configuration and volume requirements. You can also provide access to a deep repository of business, trade, and news publications, via the intranet, that employees can access when they need in-depth and reliable information on a subject.
The more sophisticated intranet content feed products even allow you to mix corporate news with external news. Factiva Publisher, for example, makes it pick-and-click easy to set up folders that will accept articles on specific subjects and companies, and/or from specific sources. You have complete
control over the subjects, companies, and respected sources that include top newspapers and business magazines such as The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, The Times of London, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, Barron', Business Week, the Economist, and Forbes. Newswires include the Dow Jones, Reuters, AP and press wires; there are media transcripts from such sources as BBC, CBS Evening News, CNNfn and Fox. News from websites such as TheStreet.com and more than 2,400 news and industry websites, all business-centric, are available as an option. In-depth profiles of more than 20,000 companies and International stock quotes are available from London, Toronto, U.S. (NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX), Hong Kong, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan and Zurich.
Residing on your server, Factiva Publisher receives this news from Factiva servers in FTP, e-mail, or HTTP. Your intranet team can then use advanced editorial and display tools to distribute targeted content to the employees who need it. Factiva Publisher also allows searching of the Factiva host article database and key business websites.
Given this vast resource, your employees could easily become overwhelmed with information. But there are three aspects of Factiva Publisher that keep this from happening.
Editorial Control. Precise editorial controls are built into Factiva Publisher. Review news before posting it, add commentary to an item, and flag important articles as "hot." The "hot" icon enables busy executives to focus on articles that provide the most relevant facts.
Factiva Intelligent Indexing. All of the content in Factiva Publisher is tagged with terms that provide "more like this" functionality to end users. Codes include more than 300,000 private and public companies, 300 geographic regions, 650 industry sectors and 250 news topics.
Personal Pages. The content feed can be personalized first for the company by the intranet content manager, and then again by each individual user. Users can establish up to five personal pages, and personalize the Factiva Publisher display to suit their own needs.
Each employee receives a personal page that displays relevant content.
To ensure this content appears where it's needed on the intranet, Factiva Publisher features a point and click design tool, Page Builder. Webmasters can visually construct how Factiva Publisher's "content modules" and Page Builder does the rest - displaying the required content and its URL for easy posting into an existing intranet page.
The combination of a content feed and an article archive makes it possible for your intranet end-users to get full value out of news. When a new article comes in, or an employee has been given a new assignment, it' often necessary to put the news in context, to drill down and get the big picture. There
is usually a "story behind the story" that is not covered in a company' press release or an article about a current event. The Factiva news archive, while it does contain the most recent stories published, also contains articles going back as far as 20 years, depending on the source.
Of course, since the Internet came along, 20 years seems like an eternity. But let' assume your business development manager is working on a deal with another company, and she wants to check on the background of the company' founders. One of the fastest ways to see how they fared in their last company is to do a search in the article archive. Local papers, many of which are contained in the library, are often an excellent source of information about area companies and their managers.
"There is usually a "story behind the story" that is not covered in a company' press release or an article about a current event."
Being able to access virtually anything that has been written on a subject, with a single search, provides both the depth and breadth that employees need when making recommendations or decisions. It' one of the best defenses against repeating mistakes that other companies have made.
This alone could pay for the content feed system.
Factiva Services: Ensuring a Positive ROI
Your intranet news content will be useful as long as the people who deliver it understand the local business environment in which you work. To this end, Factiva has offices in 58 cities in 31 countries and customer help desks covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Factiva is committed to providing industry-leading customer support. The company has deep experience as a provider of content to the world' leading businesses. Factiva products are on the desktops of more than 1 million end users, and 81% of the 1999 Global Fortune 500 companies have accounts with Factiva.
Factiva Consulting
Factiva Consulting can help you customize your corporate intranet to meet the precise information needs of your organization. The Factiva Consulting professionals have unmatched expertise in integrating Factiva's data and software products into your intranet environment. Whatever your technical environment - Microsoft, Lotus Notes, Oracle - Factiva works with you to integrate internal and external data into your enterprise portal and develop the right user interface.
Enterprise Consulting Program
Anyone responsible for an intranet knows that it' the daily, habitual use of the intranet that makes the intranet more valuable. For this reason, Factiva has an award-winning Enterprise Consulting Program: a formal, well-defined program to help clients with hundreds of users roll out and support their information products. Factiva professionals help you avoid costly mistakes, saving time and resources by providing instruction and leveraging internal resources.
When you select Factiva Publisher, you are assigned an Enterprise Consultant who works closely with your Account Executive to ensure that critical milestones are met. Your Enterprise Consultant shares strategy and advice gained from experience with other large-scale implementations.
The Enterprise Consulting program also includes a kick-off conference call, marketing materials, training and support, frequent updates, and recommended procedures. Factiva' Enterprise Consulting program is the most sophisticated after-the-sale support program in the information industry, so you're assured that your investment in Factiva Publisher will pay off handsomely.
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Conclusion
Companies are embracing intranets at a furious pace, because the benefits of providing a single information portal for employees, regardless of their location, introduces new efficiencies into the corporation and increases the company' ability to compete. Companies such as Cisco have proven that a greater level of profitability is reached when employees gain universal access to well-researched information.
Adding a powerful and convenient content feed and news archive to your intranet will provide all of your employees with a window to your marketplace. It will arm them with the latest and most accurate news available, so they can make the best possible decisions.
The challenge, of course, is choosing content and technology vendors that are as committed to increasing productivity and measuring results after implementation. That' why vendors such as Factiva must continue to develop innovative content integration tools that enable content and knowledge managers to customize their information solutions.
As corporations seek to develop knowledge management strategies to compete in the global economy, content integration solutions such as Factiva Publisher will provide both the business content and the robust features to empower intranet teams to realize their vision of a corporate-wide, knowledge sharing resource.
About Factiva
Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters company, provides world-class global news and business information through Web sites and content integration solutions.
Factiva' mission is to be the indispensable provider of business information and customized solutions which inspire our customers' best business decisions, globally and locally.
Factiva' business information includes Dow Jones and Reuters newswires and The Wall Street Journal, plus more than 7,000 other sources from around the world. These sources provide breaking news; historical articles going back up to 30 years; local-language articles; market research and investment analyst reports; and stock quotes.
Customer service is key to Factiva' success. With offices in 58 cities in 31 countries and customer help desks covering Europe, Asia and the Americas - the company is committed to ensuring that customers in every part of the world receive the service they require.
An Enterprise Consulting Program has been developed by Factiva to assist large enterprises with the successful implementation of its services. In addition, Factiva offers an alliance program for information professionals; an affiliate E-commerce program; and a partnership network for enterprise information and business portals.
To find out more about Factiva Publisher visit www.factiva.com or contact us at www.factiva.com/moreinfo.
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