acqueline Strayer wasn't worried about the hardware and software challenges she faced building an intranet for United Technologies Corp. That was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out how to convince the company's employees to use it.
Strayer, director of communications services at the $23 billion provider of products and services to the aerospace, automo- otive, and building industries, realized that most of the Hartford, Conn., company's workforce was used to communicating via printed material. The intranet, Strayer figured, would collect dust if she didn't first explain to employees how it could make their lives easier. So, she went back to Marketing 101.
"We were going to change the way people received and exchanged information," Strayer says. "It's one thing to build an intranet; it's another thing to get people to actually use it."
Tapping into classic consumer promotion techniques such as p
ublic relations, advertising, direct mail, event marketing, and customer surveys, Strayer and her team built widespread awareness of the intranet and its ability to help employees do their work. In the process, they assured rapid adoption of the communications tool. The intranet went live a year ago after six months of development at a cost of $40,000; it now supports more than 20,000 users and receives in excess of 340,000 hits each month.
The intranet, created to facilitate the exchange of information among the departments and divisions of the highly decentralized company, is designed to bring United Technologies closer and increase the exchange of ideas among employees. United Technologies also hopes the intranet will save money.
While United Technologies has not conducted a formal return-on-investment study on its intranet, the signposts to savings are clear. One example: The company has reduced weekly production costs for its Corporate Update newsletter by two-thirds by putting it online and elim
inating printing costs. For the most part, however, the intranet is saving money by saving time. The production interval for the newsletter, for example, has shrunk by 75%.
According to Ian Campbell, director of collaborative and intranet computing at International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass., research firm, United Technologies has adopted the best possible approach to deploying an intranet. "About 30% of your effort should be on technology, and about 70% on the human factor," Campbell says. "Any company that's dictating and not selling users on new technology is setting itself up for failure."
United Technologies did not make that mistake. During the first week the intranet was up, Strayer set up a promotional headquarters in the company's lunchroom. With Beach Boys' music playing in the background and posters declaring "I Have Surfed the Net," the communications services department ran demonstrations of the intranet on PCs.
Strayer and her staff also conducted several intranet presentations
to groups at corporate headquarters and announced the intra- net in company newsletters. They conducted interviews with key individuals, such as department managers, then used the information gleaned from these meetings to guide the site's design.
Thanks to careful marketing, United Technologies' intranet is achieving its goals. The Morning News Summary, a company newsletter, received just 1,000 hits in its first week online; it now receives more than 30,000 hits a week. In August 1996, the traffic for the entire intranet was 80,000 hits per month. By this past May, that figure had reached 340,000 and climbing. The company also had to redesign the intranet in January to better organize its growing volume of information.
Group Effort
To keep the intranet on track, Strayer has set up an Intranet Council composed of representatives from the communications services and IS departments representing all of United Technologies' business units, including aircraft engine maker Pratt & Whitney, heati
ng and air conditioning systems manufacturer Carrier, and elevator supplier Otis Elevator. The group meets periodically to provide feedback on use of the system and ways to improve content. Strayer and her group also conduct benchmarking with intranets at other companies to assess the relative qualities of United Technologies' own network.
Judging by user response, the marketing effort is paying off. "Before I saw the lunchroom demonstration, I didn't have a clue what the intranet could do," says Barbara Oshman, an administrative assistant in United Technologies' government affairs department. "After that, I couldn't wait to get back to my desk to use it." Oshman says she now turns to the intranet every day, tapping into the employee directory, looking at job postings, and reading corporate news updates.
For those users slower to warm up to the intranet, United Technologies provides a help desk, technical assistance, and training courses. "You can overcome anxiousness if you're quick to answer people'
s questions," says Bill Bucknall, senior VP of human resources and organization. If IS personnel can't answer a question over the phone, they go directly to employees' desks and walk them through any problems.
The company admits that it's making a slow start with its intranet deployment. For sure, reading newsletters online may not seem like a major productivity booster.
One reason for United Technologies' modest approach is because Strayer did not expect the intranet to catch on as quickly as it did. But more important, the initial applications provide "baby steps" for those employees who have little or no experience with Internet technology. Rather than overwhelm them with a big-bang introduction of complicated interactive features, Strayer decided to start small. Simple applications, she says, are paving the way for the rapid adoption of more sophisticated intranet features.
Among these more advanced applications is a reservation and travel-information system to provide employees with everythin
g they need for planning business trips. The feature will let staffers make reservations for airline tickets, rental cars, and hotel rooms-functions now carried out by a
corporate staff.
United Technologies has also partnered with Fidelity Investments to create
a site with se-cure information about employees' 401(k), pension, and other benefit and retirement savings plans. Employees, for example, will be able to calculate their retirement nest eggs based on their current savings patterns. Strayer is also examining push technology to save employees more time by letting them automate the delivery of customized information from the intranet.
The intranet, which requires a combination of nine technical, creative, and management personnel to maintain it, uses Netscape Communications' Publisher Web server software running on two Sun Microsystems' Ultra 140 Unix machines with First Watch from Qualix Corp. in San Mateo, Calif. First Watch merges the two servers under one management system to ensure that the
intranet will continue running even if one of the Ultra 140s goes down.
For delivering database information such as the employee directory, United Technologies set up two Sun Ultra 170 Unix machines running an Oracle7 database. On the client side, computers are equipped with Netscape Navigator browsers. Steve DesRoches, manager of IT services at United Technologies, says the technical side of setting up the intranet was a snap. Designing useful content has been another matter. "The lion's share of our efforts has been focused on getting good content online," DesRoches says.
Personal Touch
To that end, United Technologies offers HTML Web authoring classes to employees at corporate headquarters and is recruiting employees to serve as Webmasters for their departments or groups. "Information that can be personalized is the most valuable stuff you can put on the intranet," Strayer says.
United Technologies is also working on ways to gather more usage information about its intranet. The IS
department, for example, is experimenting with user registration and "cookies," a technology that tracks areas visited by a particular computer.
Despite the intranet's success, Strayer has realized that good marketing can't eliminate all obstacles to deploying an intranet at a company as decentralized as United Technologies.
The intranet now reaches only about 20,000 of the company's 174,000 employees in the United States and abroad. Many of United Technologies' employees work on production lines in manufacturing plants, with no offices or access to PCs. For them, Strayer is looking into setting up kiosks for intranet access.
Strayer also needs to figure out a way to make the intranet work for the more than 100,000 employees overseas. "The issues you run into when looking at international deployment of the intranet are very complicated," Strayer says. "Can you imagine translating everything that goes into an intranet into 27 languages?"
Nevertheless, Strayer says, the intranet is per
haps the only cost-effective solution for bringing the disparate business elements of United Technologies a little closer. "Our separate business units and international operations don't communicate much," she says. "But we see the intranet as having the potential to change that." So far, the outlook is good.
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acqueline Strayer wasn't worried about the hardware and software challenges she faced building an intranet for United Technologies Corp. That was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out how to convince the company's employees to use it.
