Low-Tech, High-Value Intranet

The 1980s and 1990s were tough times for British Airways. The new millennium was not kind either when in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some analysts began to wonder if BA would survive at all and talked openly about bankruptcy for more than one airline.

Since 2002, the company has re-engineered an impressive turnaround with an aggressive focus on cost-cutting and productivity. In late 2002 its share price had slumped to below £100; today BA’s share price is hovering around £500.

One catalyst for change during the impressive turnaround, in a hugely challenging business and environment, is the BA intranet. In 2001, BA put in place an ambitious plan for a low-tech intranet with lofty targets. Building on what some would call an antiquated platform, Lotus Notes and Domino, BA built an intranet that is delivering a measured value of £55 (more than US$100 million) per year.

“I have to admit I do get envious when I hear about all the technology that others (companies) are using,” confesses Alan Huish, BA’s manager of employee self-service when asked about using Lotus Notes. “But you cannot argue with our results.”

Here are just some of the BA intranet’s measures of success:

Unlike most companies, most of BA’s employees are constantly travelling and only a small percentage have a computer for work. So BA allows employees to access the intranet via the BA.com website. While encouraging and motivating use of the intranet was a chore to start (“A big culture change process,” admits Huish), BA staff has come to highly value the intranet. Up to 26,000 of BA’s 48,000 employees access the intranet every day. The most frequently used application is e-Pay where employees access their paystub via the intranet – delivering savings of $180,000 per year.

A big change in traffic occurred a little more than a year ago when the small intranet team gave the home page a face-lift, and ditched the old search engine in favour of Google. User satisfaction jumped from 59% to 80% almost overnight.

The intranet is governed by an Employee Self Service Leadership Team which comprises six executive sponsors, all report directly to the CEO. The six include the directors of HR, Operations, Engineering, Cabin Crew, CIO and CFO. The Team meets every six weeks and is focuses on direction, performance and business cases for improving self-service (e.g. staff present ideas to improve self-service and the intranet).

On a day-to-day basis, the high-performance intranet is managed by a team of two that reports directly to the CIO. Instead of managing a big staff, the BA intranet works on a distributed content model. Instead of one or two gatekeeper editors, the BA intranet has more than 300 trained publishers that use the Lotus publishing tool. Huish admits that content consistency can be a challenge, but the trade-off is higher savings (and more empowered content owners).

BA’s most recent win is a new web e-mail system. Until recently, most employees did not have e-mail (31,000 frontline staff without computer). The new intranet home page features a log-in to e-mail. Originally, the middle management team was “very frightened about an increase in e-mail (about getting too much e-mail),” says Huish. “But those fears haven’t materialized.”

“We all knew that we had to give all our people at e-mail at some point… but how do you justify it?” The principal reason behind the business case for web mail was the cost of printing and distributing so much paper – and for renting the required space to maintain 25,000 mailbox cubbies at Heathrow Terminal 5.

When asked what is the biggest reason for BA’s intranet success, Huish doesn’t hesitate: “Make it available on the Internet – it was our big turning point when we made the intranet available by home. It’s non-negotiable.”