COLT Telecom
Companies offering communications products and services
are not compelled to invest in comprehensive in-house communication.
COLT Telecom is different...
London-based COLT Telecom Group plc is a European telecommunications company. COLT Telecom has its own fibre-optic network for local and long-distance communication, as well as various internet solution centres. Colt Telecom’s diverse product range comprises local, national and international speech, data and internet services for large and medium-sized companies.
Its clients include Bank of America, IKEA, ADAC and Reuters. With a presence in 13 countries, Colt Telecom employs a total of 5,000 people. The German subsidiary, Frankfurt-based COLT Telecom GmbH, employs nearly 1,400 people, who look after the interests of around 15,000 business customers.
Communication on all channels
COLT Telecom quickly recognised the importance for large companies of structured, accessible communications. For firms with rapidly growing customer volumes, the future lies in paperless communication. Instead, business processes should be carried out online as far as possible. At COLT Telecom, an external, structured and up-to-date information flow is provided by two company websites and two extranets. The client website offers users an extensive range of services and information, while the web-based information system caters for sales partners, supplying details about technological developments in the product portfolio.
Given the size of the company, number of products and technical complexity involved, COLT Telecom put great emphasis on its internal communications, supported by an intranet. The first-generation intranet was not particularly user-friendly with difficult navigation so was not widely adopted by most employees.
As Hyperwave technology had successfully used in previous projects involving internet functions, the second-generation COLT Telecom intranet, named COLTNet was based on Hyperwave’s Knowledge Management Platform.
COLTNet – the second-generation intranet
A project group at COLT Telecom drew up a list of criteria to select a suitable provider. Among the principal considerations for the new intranet solution were: well-structured contents that could be swiftly located via a search function, the ability to adapt the interface to COLT’s corporate design, and improved systems performance. Moreover, every employee should have access to a personalised user interface in order for their work to be organised more simply and effectively.
Hyperwave software was chosen because COLT Telecom had already enjoyed good experiences with the modular technology and technical competence during the implementation of the website and extranet projects. The intranet solution is fully scaleable and can work with database systems such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL-Server, and with Windows 2000 and Linux operating systems.
The system is flexible and can be extended. Our project team was therefore able to develop additional functionalities in-house without any difficulty. Tino Seidel, technical developer at COLT Telecom
Staff go online
The COLTNet project began in April 2001 and the intranet application was successfully up and running August of that year. The internal information platform was subsequently extended to the offices in France seamlessly via the Multiple Language Support feature of the system. In Austria and Switzerland, the intranet went live in August 2002, again after only three months project time. During the second phase of implementation, the data inventories of the predecessor intranet and various file servers are also being integrated. Currently, the data inventories include over 374,000 documents and the number of users in Europe now totals 1,800.
A major consideration was to ensure that the structure of the COLTNet intranet information system was easy to grasp. The site breaks down the following company-relevant headings: News contains all the official information from the management that concerns all employees. Employees stores all the data that is of basic importance for daily work. Departments allows each part of the company to present itself internally as a separate ‘microcosm.’ The navigation rubric Library locates company-wide guidelines and manuals. Links contains all cross-references that are relevant to employees. Every function within the company, such as Marketing, Sales or Personnel has a knowledge manager who is responsible for keeping the content of each specific department up to date.
The intranet was adapted to the corporate design of COLT Telecom Germany. The personalised user interface – called myCOLT is simple to configure as various modules such as favourites, employee search and addresses can be easily inserted.
Faster, better, clearer...
Employees have instant access to all important company data and up to the minute information around the clock. "You can tell how well the intranet has gone down among staff – we’re getting around 1,500 visits a day," says Annick Cathrin Weikert, project manager for Intranet Germany.
Navigating among data inventories on COLTNet is simple and clear to encourage employees to utilise the system. "COLTNet improves the interactive exchange of knowledge and collaboration across the company. At the same time, the flow of communication is permanently optimised,” commented Weikert, describing the benefits of the new intranet. "Inter-departmental collaboration within the company and intensive preparations for the intranet’s introduction were an additional guarantee of success.” she adds.
Looking forward
A natural addition to the intranet is the planned project work place. This application supports all project work in virtual teams. "The new application will run on a knowledge management platform,” says Michael Scholl, technical project director at COLT Telecom. Via this collaboration, short lead-time projects can be worked on spontaneously and all important data relevant to clients can be filed away. For example, project-relevant data and documents can be viewed, contracts filed and communication between the different national subsidiaries of COLT Telecom can be supported. This new technical implementation facilitates a targeted expansion of the knowledge management system at COLT Telecom.