/ Utility Gains Productivity, Innovation from Content Management, Collaboration Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United Kingdom
Industry: Utilities
Customer Profile
Severn Trent Water, active from mid-Wales to the East Midlands in the United Kingdom, is a major water and sewerage services supplier to more than 8.2 million customers. The company employs 5,600 people.
Business Situation
Severn Trent relied on email and decentralised data stores for content management and collaboration, resulting in lengthy and expensive business processes.
Solution
The company chose Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 over upgrades to IBM Lotus Notes and its intranet, based on WebSphere.
Benefits
- Speeds publishing of more, and more current, content
- Encourages innovation
- Spurs culture change on content management and collaboration
Zuzana Lee-Emery, Strategy and Architecture, Severn Trent Water
Severn Trent Water wanted its information to flow as smoothly as the water it delivered daily to millions of customers in the United Kingdom. Its existing systems had grown organically over time; now it was time to adopt a single, strategic direction. For a new content management and collaboration platform, the company chose Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 over an update to its IBM Lotus Notes deployment and aging intranet, based on WebSphere. The results: the company’s intranet is expected to publish more content more quickly, while saving editors time that they can use to boost the quality of content. Collaboration tools will foster greater innovation. And the new technology supports a broader drive to modernise the ways that employees use and share information.
Situation
Some things flowed quickly at Severn Trent Water, and some things didn’t.
What flowed well were the high-quality water and sewerage services that the company provides to more than 8.2 million households and businesses from mid-Wales to the East Midlands in the United Kingdom. Those services include the daily provision of almost two billion litres of drinking water—enough to fill more than 1,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Severn Trent Water also processes around 2.7 billion litres of wastewater daily.
What flowed less well was something that might not immediately be associated with a provider of water and sewerage services: information. But information of all sorts needed to flow just as smoothly. That information included customer communications; documents shared or jointly authored by employees; exchanges with contractors and consultants engaged on company projects; and company news disseminated over the intranet.
Employees managed content and collaborated primarily through email attachments, file shares, IBM Lotus Notes databases, and an IBM WebSphere–based intranet. The technologies on which Severn Trent Water relied were heavily customised, making upgrades costly and time consuming. Nor did they readily integrate with the company’s recently-deployed SAP enterprise resource planning system.
Severn Trent Water found it difficult to realise one of its central visions for its information systems. “We wanted one place for employees to go to see all the information that was important to them,” says William Hewish, Chief Technology Officer at Severn Trent Water. “That information was located in various systems around the company. Much of it was in SAP—a manager’s workload lists, for example—so we wanted employees to have an initial view of all of this information, and then easy, direct access to the documentation and details behind it, whether it was in SAP or elsewhere.”
Some of the company’s information issues were more basic. “We had significant numbers of documents mailed around the company and to external partners,” says Jeff Hart, Corporate Information Manager at Severn Trent Water. “That meant massive volumes of email, duplication of documents, and a lack of version control. Documents were hard to find, unless you already knew where to look. This put a strain on our infrastructure and resulted in a significant loss of time for our employees as they searched for documents.”
The company also experienced inefficient workflow around documents and processes. For example, news stories destined for the company’s intranet front page could go through six reviewers before being posted. Relying on email for this process meant delays until each reviewer in turn got to his or her inbox. There was no central, always available document to which all reviewers could go.
These issues had an impact throughout the company. “The way we’ve traditionally worked with information made it difficult to collaborate, for example, to publish news stories quickly,” says Hewish. “We didn’t track the review process, so we didn’t know where a story was in that process. Reviewers had to bend their schedules to the process, rather than being able to review stories at their earliest opportunity.”
Solution
By 2009, Severn Trent Water was ready for new technology to enhance content management and collaboration, and support the flow of information. But which technology? The company knew that centralising content management and standardising collaboration tools would require a technology that was both more powerful than its current environment, to serve the full sweep of the enterprise, and more flexible, to encourage user adoption and change the current corporate culture. Severn Trent didn’t see that the upgraded versions of its current technologies would meet these requirements. And that wasn’t the only concern.
Apart from its SAP deployment, Severn Trent Water had traditionally used IBM technology. But over the previous two years, it had implemented a new strategic direction toward Microsoft technology. The company wanted to gain the benefits of easy training and use, lower costs, and greater interoperability among solutions that come with using Microsoft software. Could the Microsoft-centric strategy work for content management and collaboration?
Severn Trent Water conducted a pilot test in which a handful of teams throughout the company worked with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which was the current version of the Microsoft content management and collaboration software at the time. The goal was as basic as the use of the technology: to see if longstanding IBM Lotus Notes users could easily adapt to Office SharePoint Server as a central document repository.
The standards and procedures management team, for example, had content management and collaboration needs that focused on developing and maintaining the company’s standards and procedures. That team tested whether an out-of-the-box Office SharePoint Server deployment could provide a shared area for all up-to-date standards and procedures owned and managed by Water and Waste Water Services, all stored on one system in a central location and using standard templates.
The results from the standards and procedures management team and others at Severn Trent Water was consistent: Office SharePoint Server required little if any user training, no customisation, delivered fast and reliable performance, and improved business processes.
Severn Trent Water decided to make SharePoint technology the platform for enterprisewide content management and collaboration, including a centralised portal to replace the existing intranet, and new departmental websites to replace the email-and-file-share tradition for sharing information. Collaboration across departments—not just within them— could now occur. It was now early 2010, and time for Severn Trent Water to make another decision. With the imminent product launch of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, the company decided to move directly to this latest version of SharePoint technology.
“Our adoption of SharePoint Server 2010 will bring very specific advantages to us,” says Zuzana Lee-Emery, Strategy and Architecture, Severn Trent Water. “For example, we are also upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007. One of our goals has been to encourage user adoption of new technology by providing an intuitive, consistent user interface. Once our employees are comfortable with the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, it will be a simple matter for them to begin using SharePoint Server 2010, which operates with the same interface. We see it being easier for them to generate and post web content using the new interface in these two products.”
The company’s first-phase rollout of SharePoint Server 2010 will focus on content management, with additional capabilities being rolled out over another 12 months.
Severn Trent Water also expects to deploy Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, which will enable it to decommission its Lotus Notes–based email system.
“Our broad technology plan calls for us to reduce technology complexity by aligning ourselves with the Microsoft strategy and roadmap for collaboration and communication,” says Hewish. “That will reduce our costs while preparing us for the future.”
Benefits
With its ongoing rollout of SharePoint Server 2010, Severn Trent Water expects to gain more and faster publishing to its intranet, collaboration to help spur innovation, and momentum for its campaign of cultural change.
Speeds Publishing of More Current Content
In this early phase of the deployment of SharePoint Server 2010 at Severn Trent Water, one of the teams working with the technology is responsible for producing news stories for the company’s intranet. There, the first reviews of SharePoint Server 2010 are positive and focus on the team’s ability to use the software to boost efficiency in content management.
“We had a variety of systems before, and no tools for content management,” says Ethan Black, Intranet Manager and Editor at Severn Trent Water. “Now, with SharePoint Server 2010, we will be able to do what we couldn’t before. We’re looking to a brighter future.”
The company’s brighter future includes the creation of sites for, and managed by, the business units, rather than by the internal communications team or IT staff. The result will be the faster and fuller publishing of content that employees need to do their jobs.
The corporate intranet will operate more efficiently, as well. With SharePoint workflow, version control problems and review delays will be eliminated, shaving an hour off the time to approve a typical story. Content will post in real time instead of the next day—especially important when staff need to be informed of breaking news at the company. The editor will set up SharePoint technology to pull departmental content directly into the intranet front page without requiring manual intervention. By using SharePoint editing and formatting tools, Black will save about 15 minutes per article—totalling anywhere from 45 minutes to several hours a day, depending on the number of articles to be posted.
Black intends to make the most of that time saving. “With many of the administrative tasks I supervise being handled automatically or by the business units, I will be able to spend more time focusing on the quality of the news articles we publish,” he says. “I’ll also take on more of a mentoring role to the contributors to the intranet, helping them to create more focused articles that hold reader interest.”
Severn Trent Water will also see efficiencies elsewhere. For example, tight interoperability with the SAP environment will make a SharePoint Server–based portal an ideal way not just to access intranet content, but also to directly access, work with, and complete SAP content and processes.
Encourages Greater Innovation
Employees at Severn Trent Water will have new collaboration and social networking tools for working together more effectively, further promoting innovative thinking. Those tools will include wikis, blogs, and discussion boards.
By having limited access to the content management and collaboration tools, external partners will be able to work more closely with Severn Trent. This will help engineering and other projects come to fruition more quickly and give the participants additional time to work more innovatively.
“We’re excited about the new social networking tools in SharePoint Server 2010,” says Zuzana Lee-Emery. “These tools mean better sharing of information.Better sharing of information saves time and money, and furthers innovation.”
Greater involvement of the business units in publishing intranet content is just one example of how more of the employees at Severn Trent Water will use SharePoint Server 2010 to work together productively. For example, Black, the Intranet Editor and Publisher, sees his group of 35 contributors tripling in size because authoring tools that are easier to use can be used by more people.
Even traditionally one-way communications, such as the weekly articles on the company written by Severn Trent employees, will be transformed into tools for two-way communications that engage more of the company’s staff.
“These articles will likely be recast as blog posts with the comments feature enabled at the end of the entries,” says Black. “That will make it possible, for example, for conversations between the chief executive and employees on crucial issues to begin on the front page of the intranet, within hours of the initial posting. Employees will see that the intranet is a two-way communications platform through which they can get involved in what happens here. That’s yet another spur to innovation.”
Spurs Change on Content Management, Collaboration
The campaign to modernise the way that employees use and share information at Severn Trent Water encourages a shift from email and decentralised repositories and toward standardised, centralised ways of doing business. This campaign precedes the deployment of SharePoint Server 2010 but its adoption is providing added momentum to the cultural change effort.
“As we roll out SharePoint Server 2010, employees will have a viable—and preferable—alternative to email and to various content management schemes,” says Hewish. “We expect the result to be that people will use email more selectively. They will work together more effectively. They will be willing to give up their personal or departmental data stores for centralised stores because we will provide a content management platform on which they can rely. SharePoint Server 2010 will help to make our cultural change campaign a success.”
Avoids Costly Upgrades
Severn Trent Water didn’t adopt SharePoint Server 2010 to reduce costs, but that has become an additional benefit of the deployment.
The company originally obtained its Office SharePoint Server licenses to build team sites to replace existing Lotus Notes applications. As planning was underway for the company’s intranet, Severn Trent Water executives realized that they could use those same licenses to build the intranet on Office SharePoint Server.
“The tremendous savings we saw in choosing SharePoint Server 2010 over the alternatives available to us could be just the beginning,” says Lee-Emery. “The continuing savings we expect to see, in productivity and business process efficiency, could well meet or exceed our savings to date.”
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web.
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