Every major topic - such as major competitors, industry customer groups and some technology areas, such as wireless - has its own page. Those pages are automatically populated by the news feed and BT's content management system, but the intellact staff members organise the pages and give the really juicy stories top billing.
Woolf notes that the IRC team's responsibilities shifted dramatically with the growth of intellact. Instead of sifting paper, they now must make educated judgements about what information is most important. "The team is now focused on categorisation of content," he says. While the search engine does most of the sorting automatically, using search scripts that the intellact staff have defined and refined over time, the home pages for the news and research sections are still edited by hand. "[Editors are] responsible for liaising with customers inside the business, figuring out what their requirements are, dealing with external [research] vendors and then putting a portal page together which automatically posts the latest relevant research from each supplier," says Woolf. Each of the five site editors makes sure that vital reports are given prominent and long-term placement on relevant news channels, rather than rotated off automatically when newer stories arrive.
If users can't find what they're looking for on the edited topic pages, intellact provides a straightforward search page that can search on keywords, time frame and sources - either by individual source, category (such as news or outside research) or the entire intellact database. The search engine then ranks and summarises the results. BT currently licenses content for six months, which Woolf says is a good balance between saving money and having access to important information.
Neither BT nor Factiva would disclose the total or ongoing costs associated with intellact, and any ROI analysis falls into the anecdotal category. Woolf says he has heard a number of stories over the years in which intellact is credited with providing the necessary details to expedite or close a particular deal or capture the attention of a certain customer. For example, he cites a company survey in which one account director reported his sales team generated 1 million pounds (about 2.8 million) in new business by using intellact briefings. The most compelling hard ROI thus far comes from a 1999 survey of intellact users, conducted as part of an ongoing internal marketing campaign to boost the system's popularity. The 800 respondents indicated that intellact was saving them a total of 12 full-time employees.
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