Real World Intranets, Part 5

Ketchum New Business and Visibility Department: A Case Study

11/14/01

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Some corporate intranets grow in small steps-an interactive gadget added here, a searchable database there-and some grow in great leaps. The intranet for Ketchum, a global public relations company, recently experienced just such a leap, one that made the site more an integrated part of employee and customer work lives than before. It started when Ketchum, whose clients include Heinz, IBM, and Johnson & Johnson, received a simple directive from Omnicom Group Inc., its parent company: reexamine the purpose of the intranet and how it can create new opportunities within the business.

Ketchum Catches Up
As Andy Roach, Ketchum's CIO, explains it, Ketchum's first intranet was purely "brochureware." Full of static pages, it did provide a centralized location for important info, but it didn't do much more than that. All content was written by a central group of editors, so workers around the company didn't have a voice. But it's biggest liability was that it simply didn't do enough to advance the business. It was great with wasted potential.

That began to change in September, 1999, when Roach was given the directive by Omnicom. The intranet needed to integrate itself into employees work loads, becoming a highly effective, personalized site. Besides that, it needed to bridge the physical gap between Ketchum and its outside clients, providing a seamless place to work on projects jointly.

With that in mind, Roach determined four criteria for planning the intranet's next version: personalization, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and data sharing (meaning the ability to search for relevant data across the enterprise). He looked at portal companies with an eye not just for the best product, but for companies that Ketchum could partner with, creating in-depth relationships in which exchanges of services defrayed the actual cost.

Partners in Progress
Ketchum ended up partnering with Plumtree Software, makers of an eponymous portal program. Ketchum gains because Plumtree keeps them on the cutting-edge, offering them new tools and features first. While Ketchum doesn't do PR work for Plumtree, it does help them by referencing them in articles (like this one). Roach himself frequently speaks at Plumtree seminars.

The first version of this new intranet, dubbed myKGN (for Ketchum Global Network), launched in November, 2000. Using Plumtree 3.5, it offered way for users to personalize the intranet, seeing the information they needed on their customized homepages. Among other things, this new version had a directory of experts, a number of interactive gadgets-including one for accessing MediaMap, a directory or PR sources-and a way to enter project time information online.

Ketchum also formed a partnership with eRooms, in redesigning the intranet, although that relationship is more like a traditional client-customer one. eRooms lets employees collaborate in a secure environment with outside clients. With eRooms, Ketchum's employees could place a draft of a document online and share it with clients, knowing that all changes and previous versions would be saved automatically.

One of the biggest gains was the knowledge management system. With the new intranet came a new directory of client work, profiles, expert information, and news articles, all metatagged and input by a staff of three fulltime librarians. These were new positions and, according to Roach, they do nothing but cull information from employees and outside sources.

Ketchum's intranet achieves 99 percent uptime, Roach says, which he hopes to increase to 100 percent through greater redundancy. The site operates off a network of Dell P3 multiprocessor servers-three each for the production, staging, and development areas. Roach uses Windows NT, but says he'll soon make the jump to Windows 2000.

New Biz and Viz
The improved Ketchum intranet is especially helpful to the New Business and Visibility department, known as New Biz and Viz. More spread out that other departments, New Biz and Viz has twenty-five employees who are scattered around the globe.

Receiving and responding to Request for Proposals (RFPs) is a large part of New Biz and Viz's job, says Senior vice president and associate director Kelly Skoloda. Companies looking for PR representation send out RFPs to agencies, asking for ideas on how that agency would represent them. Previously, members of this far-flung department would create new eye-grabbing ideas for each proposal. Now, with a more collaborative intranet, they can photograph and place their best creative mailings online, for others to see. For example, the department recently sent a mailing to Smuckers, after the company acquired Crisco and Jif. Ketchum's mailing included homemade peanut-butter cookies made with Jif, Skoloda says, to show Ketchum's passion for the product.

Moving Ahead
Since that first giant leap, the Ketchum intranet has grown again. In September, 2001, the next version debuted, providing a new method of creating and joining online communities. Not as secure as an eRoom, these communities are easier to create and allow anyone to join an area where they have an interest.

And that's not all. By the time this article posts, Ketchum will have launched a few version of the site that offers instant translation to its foreign offices. These offices were already linked to the intranet, but now for the first time they'll see the content in their own language. Along with this rollout comes 90 new interactive gadgets.

Growing the core business needs to be the prime concern of any intranet, and with its recent efforts, Ketchum's site has done just that. It may not be easy to measure the effect of better collaboration on the bottom line, but the effects will surely be felt throughout the company.

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