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| | Problem
Despite the fact that companies have been developing Intranets since 1993-1994 (it was an evolution of document and content management solutions), at the end of the nineties, we were in the early days of Intranet use. New and more extensive uses of intranet were predicted, as companies integrated them into how their employees and partners worked.
Then, the Internet transformed a critical element in business strategies: the way in which businesses connect with their various stakeholders. During the first wave of the Internet revolution, the emphasis was on connecting a company with its suppliers and customers, and new forms of connectivity through the Internet were introduced with the acronyms B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer).
Now a second wave of the revolution has begun, along with another acronym. It's called B2E, or business-to-employee, and it is a focal point for today's most progressive companies, where a top-of-the-mind issue for CEOs and business leaders is human capital.
Successful employee communication delivery has been evolving through the adoption of B2E portals, where a more compelling assortment of dynamic content and self-service applications is emerging, in comparison to intranets and paper.
Regardless of economic conditions, workforce productivity is critically important to sustaining profit margins and market share. Employees who work efficiently can devote more time to serving customer needs, finding new revenue opportunities, and continuing to innovate. There are studies where employees report saving nearly 3 hours per week by using their intranet or corporate portal to help them do their jobs. What could your employees accomplish with an extra month of work per year?
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| | Solution
Simply stated, B2E is a portal that provides an employee with a customized, current and personalized homepage of news, information and applications. Using digital technology, Internet Web sites and intranets within an existing business process, B2E links employees to a range of internal and external information, and with each other. It is all about connectivity and collaborative work among employees and between employees and the external world – which are indeed critical elements in today's competitive business strategy.
In its widest sense, it involves the provision of a portal to every authorised employee to enable him or her to access all the necessary systems, processes and information, whether internal or external to the company, in order to undertake their role. The B2E portal is fast becoming the foundation for employee communication and collaboration in the New Economy.
Because portals unify content and applications in a customisable user interface, their popularity continues to increase. Giga expects portals to become the dominant means by which all users access corporate business content, processes and services in 2005.
To control scope creep and keep portals on target, organizations should focus on defining a specific audience and business strategy that the portal will address, picking the right infrastructure to support it and measuring concrete benefits and paybacks.
Corporate Portal Goals
The first step must be to identify the benefits an Enterprise Portal can offer, and the importance of those benefits to your specific corporate goals:
- Increased competitiveness;
- Improved communication;
- Cost reduced now and avoid later;
- Productivity improvements;
- Shortened product time to market;
- Smarter business decision making;
- Better customer support and sales;
- Stronger employee relationships.
Corporate Portal Requirements
To achieve these goals, some basic elements need to be represented in an Enterprise Portal strategy:
- The customisable portal interface to the user – i.e. provide access to data by all stakeholder in company’s value chain in the appropriate format;
- The information infrastructure that manages the information flow and user administration for the portal application – i.e. a comprehensive Web Content and Document Management system;
- The connectivity on the back-end to the necessary Enterprise data sources;
- Dedicated service platforms can speed up deployment of new, effective multi-channel portals, now key to service provision;
- Guarantee Performance, Availability, Serviceability and Security.
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| | Description
Key Principles of Corporate Portals
B2E is a platform to provide human capital solutions and a form of instant connectivity with the workforce. With a B2E portal, companies and employees can gain from the following:
- Smarter Business Decision Making - Access to shared information such as organisational policies and procedures, or sales and marketing tools to promote sound planning and decision-making. Information is presented in context and there is support for automated business process workflow and approval. It has already been embraced by a number of the world's most successful companies that it empowers organisations to standardise business practices across geographical locations, by defining roles and providing working individuals with precisely the information, applications, and services they need to fulfil those roles;
- Cost reduced – by giving all employees access to online training, the organisation can realise savings in employee time and out-of-pocket costs incurred through travel;
- Productivity improvements - Improved employee productivity as B2E is found to leverage the knowledge of the workforce by widening collaboration and providing speedier access to tools and information;
- Shorter Time-To-Market - Platform and infrastructure necessary to help employees use the Internet to do their jobs more effectively
· Better customer support - Seamless linkage of employees and customers: personalized access to information and current information, support for Instant Messaging and email;
- Stronger employee relationships - Improved Web management: the portal harnesses the collaborative networking power of the Internet to create and manage productive new employee communities. Support for collaboration groups and group calendars;
- Increased competitiveness - Retain and leverage talent: an effective employee portal on your corporate intranet that has been customised to an employees' individual needs makes it easier to use and allows individuals to focus on value-added activities. Attract talent – today's workforce values tools that allow them to identify career options, self-assess their competencies and readiness for advancement, and acquire new skills;
- Improve communication between corporation employees - CEOs and other executives with a single channel for communicating with employees globally.
Knowledge-based applications enhance service levels to employees in the context of Web-based employee relationship management strategies by delivering relevant information about company policies, benefits and human resources programs. Corporate policies can be published and distributed through a corporate intranet Web site, an intranet portal or through integration with an e-learning system.
Almost all IT strategic plans have the magic phrase: the right information, at the right place, at the right time. Only with recent development around the use of context in computing can IT even start to deliver on such a goal.
To facilitate knowledge sharing across a global network, corporations rely on enterprise portals for content management (e.g., structured taxonomy, indexed documents, search), including the integration of enterprises proprietary Expertise and Client databases. Crucial to a successful portal strategy is the ability to leverage the up-to-date information produced by key business systems without the need to impact their ongoing operation. This has the potential of making information accessible at a low cost across corporate boundaries. This requires the ability to integrate seamlessly with existing Document Management, Imaging and Enterprise systems that manage:
- Business Content (Bills, Contracts, Reports, Documents, Images, etc.);
- Operational Content (DB data, ERP data, AR/AP data, CRM data, HR data, forms, etc)
- Web Content (XML, Meta-Data, Templates, HTML, Dynamic Web pages, Documents, Images, etc)
- Business Process Workflow;
The enterprise Portal must sit on top of an application that supplies the content to the portal, and that supports the effective management of the information flowing into and out of the portal, along with the meta-data that comprises the look-and-feel and functionality of the portal application:
- Support of a Content Lifecycle methodology: Staging and Authorization capabilities for creation, staging (Edit / Approve / Release) and management of content through its full lifecycle;
- Integration with a comprehensive, distributed Web Content Management System;
- Integration with a comprehensive Document Management System, that provides access to back-office enterprise information and systems;
- The ability to both Aggregate and Serve Content through the portal.
Finally, one important feature of these portals is to provide a personalized and customized work environment for employees, where information can be accessed anytime from anywhere through their desktops, laptops or personal digital assistants - Multi-Channel Access.
Implementation Approach
Because B2E is still new, many organisations are in the early stages of developing a B2E strategy. Initially, many companies are bent on reducing general and administrative costs by moving one or more internal processes – such as HR, finance, corporate communications, information technology etc - onto the web.
Some organisations may want to approach B2E incrementally while others may want to develop a complete, multifunctional portal. There are several solutions to look at, but there is no single solution that works for everyone:
- Functional solutions that enable companies to improve a single process, such as travel or sales reporting, by moving it onto the Web;
- Functional portals which are more complex, enabling companies to improve a single corporate function such as human resource, finance or travel services, by moving it onto the Web;
- Thin portals which provide a channel for global corporate communications and which link existing intranet and internet applications;
- Fat portals which are the most comprehensive and complex B2E solution, bringing a personalised work environment to every employees' desktop or PDA.
These enable companies to radically transform the way their employees and partners work by transferring all company processes onto the Web.
Actions
In effort for designing and implementing next generation intranets and corporate portals, the following actions are recommended:
- Identify and track portal benefits - Find out the effect your intranet or corporate portal is having on your company’s workforce productivity, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.
- Track portal usage and satisfaction – Productivity and other benefits increase with higher usage. Identify key metrics to measure increased usage and track month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter using site statistics and employee usage surveys
- Plug gaps in your portal – Prioritise your portal initiatives by comparing your portal’s content and features to the “cost of entry” and “biggest opportunities” identified in the gap analysis. Alternatively, conduct a gap analysis of your own to identify content and features that are highly important to your employees, but not currently being well provided. Don't forget to address the critical design factors to ensure a compelling employee experience
- Provide self-service - Employees prefer self-service for certain administrative tasks and it’s good for the company. Analyze the ROI and act quickly to begin saving. Make sure to include budget for proper training and awareness building
- Give them the tools to share - Sharing documents, knowledge, and ideas is great for the
company, but it won’t happen unless employees have the proper tools. Incentives may be a quick way to encourage non-sharers, but longer term, employees will share because it's beneficial to them and their colleagues.
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| | Benefits
Improved working conditions and greater control for individuals, lower costs and faster response times for companies are just some of the benefits companies around the globe are beginning to report from the internal use of Internet technologies, known as B2E (Business to Employee).
The result is cost-effective training and development opportunities, recruitment possibilities, improved communications, streamlined operations and effective workforce management.
With a B2E portal organisations have the tools to:
- Reduce costs;
- Host powerful, newly integrated applications;
- Leverage back-end investments;
- Bring e-business solutions to internal customers;
- Move work to the web;
- Create and manage employee communities;
- Create a powerful tool for change management.
The benefits of B2E can be enormous. By giving employees online access to training, companies can reduce not only travel costs but also employee travel time. IBM has estimated annual savings of more than $120 million using B2E training methods. In addition, as Karin Muchall, a senior manager in national learning and education for PricewaterhouseCoopers points out, "e-learning allows training to be dispersed more rapidly and effectively, thereby enabling the firm to serve its clients better."
A B2E portal can serve as an important tool for integrating multi-national companies and new acquisitions and can also connect different departments together – such as marketing and production – to improve production scheduling, shorten delivery times, reduce inventories and increase customer satisfaction.
In today's demanding and competitive world, B2E can shorten the development life cycle so that new products and services can be brought to market at e-speed.
Unfortunately, the results of B2E solutions to-date have been mixed.
Research by Outsell Inc. reports that 30 percent of workers surveyed avoided B2E intranets because they were hard to use – often taking up to half an hour to complete the simplest of searches. This failure is due to most companies launching B2E portals without a sound strategy for implementation. What and how content is available to employees is key to the success of B2E.
Properly implemented, B2E provides a revolutionary way for companies to connect both internal and external stakeholders. Like its predecessors, this new Internet wave promises to become an important part of a competitive business strategy in the future.
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Process Management
