Alliance & Leicester brings intranet closer to staff

Alliance & Leicester has had a wide-ranging intranet for more than five years but recently decided it was time for an upgrade.

The responsibility for connecting 9,000 staff over the intranet - at A&L's head office, 250 regional branches and seven UK-based call centres - rests with the corporate communications unit. And, working closely with the IT department, it was clear the existing process was becoming laborious.

The whole project seems a classic case of the right infrastructure meaning less reliance on the IT department, the vendor and even the cadre of staff who previously spent much of their time publishing.

Audrey Philbrooks, group intranet manager at Alliance & Leicester within the corporate comms unit, told silicon.com: "We had invested [in the intranet] but not looked at how staff used it."

Over the years, around 40 to 80 staff became trained in Dreamweaver, to publish material to the environment. Around another 20 to 25 acquired "very basic in-house content management system" skills, said Philbrooks.

Those responsibilities will now largely disappear since A&L has upgraded its intranet using Percusion Software's Rhythmyx enterprise content management (ECM) system.

Philbrooks said: "We wanted the intranet to be content led, not technology led. It should be about people using content to do things, not [technical] bells and whistles."

She said the company looked around at the available software and the companies providing it. A&L was going through an upgrade of Microsoft software but decided against using the company for its intranet, moving on from its Site Server software.

She added: "We chose Percusion because of the product's price bracket and because they were one of the few companies that asked us what we wanted to do."

The IT department originally had four staff on the project and one has already been redeployed. This will be reduced further, with one staff member working full-time on the project and one doing application development work.

David Churchill, A&L technology strategy and architecture manager, said a big win has been removing the day-to-day administration of the intranet from the IT department. He also considers Percusion's experience with other financial services firms was a tick in the right box.

The FTSE 100 FS company runs an annual survey that quantifies direct and indirect costs and, while precise numbers aren't yet forthcoming, A&L's Philbrooks reckons the Rhythmyx software is paying off already.

On the operational side, she said the upgrade has "taken away a layer of web publishers across the business". She now calls the set-up "more DIY" and doesn't pine for the days of Dreamweaver expertise and an intranet manager in every department.

A&L doesn't claim to have the world's or even the sector's most advanced intranet. But, says Philbrooks, "you get the intranet you deserve" - meaning that for one thing it's critical the system is used by and of value to as many staff as possible.

Using a Rhythmyx feature called De-Coupled Delivery, A&L will be able to reuse content on multiple channels without additional licensing costs. This makes it easier, for example, to show information on plasma or LCD screens, placed at the right spots at HQ or in the call centres.

The whole project seems a classic case of the right infrastructure meaning less reliance on the IT department, the vendor and even the cadre of staff who previously spent much of their time publishing.