Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Leading Natural Gas Company Improves Communication, Compliance, Performance
Overview
Country or region:United States
Industry:Manufacturing: Oil and Gas
Customer Profile
El Paso Corporation, based in Houston, Texas, is one of North America’s largest independent natural gas producers. El Paso has 5,500 employees and estimated revenue of U.S.$4 billion in 2005.
Business Situation
El Paso Corporation needed to improve internal communication, which would increase employee participation and collaboration while maintaining compliance with strict industry regulations.
Solution
The company implemented Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 to streamline, consolidate, and improve employee communications by placing the company’s intranet on a portal site.
Benefits
Unified, controlledcommunication
Simplified management
Cost savings of U.S.$25,000 for
one application
Targeted user information / “SharePoint Portal Server 2003 will help our employees get the information they need and make more efficient use of time and technology.”
Nancy Falk, Manager, Public Relations, El Paso Corporation
El Paso Corporation owns North America’s largest natural gas pipeline system and is one of North America’s largest independent natural gas producers. Because many of the company’s employees work in the field, communicating important corporate information to the distributed work force had become a challenge. Employee communications were further complicated by the existence of multiple sources of information, numerous e-mail messages sent to the entire work force, and regulatory issues that required El Paso to restrict information flow between its regulated and nonregulated businesses. Using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, El Paso created a communications solution that unifies information and improves communications while satisfying compliance and regulatory requirements. In addition, the solution provides benefits such as enhanced employee collaboration.
Situation
The operations of El Paso Corporation, which include natural gas transmission as well as oil and natural gas exploration and production, reach far beyond its Houston, Texas, headquarters to multiple offices from Massachusetts to California. Communicating effectively with 5,500 employees in a distributed work force would challenge any large company, but El Paso faces the additional challenge of complying with the many federal regulations that govern the oil and gas industry.
Distributed Work Force
El Paso has 55,500 miles of pipeline to maintain, and many of the company’s more than 2,000 field workers spend their days outside; one company study revealed that 17 percent of field workers’ time is spent driving a truck each day. Delivering important company information to those employees was problematic.
El Paso attempted to get its employees’ attention by creating video messages from the chief executive officer (CEO), which were broadcast on the company’s intranet, but an internal survey revealed that only 7 percent of employees were watching those corporate videos. “We had a sense that people weren't watching, but we confirmed that at our all-employee meeting in August 2005,” says Nancy Falk, Manager of Public Relations for El Paso Corporation. “After the tenth person asked questions about the same issue—which our CEO had already explained in a video—we knew people weren’t watching. Our employee communications program needed work.”
Additional information on topics such as benefits, fitness, IT updates, ethics, and employee training were sent by e-mail from various departments in the company. “Many departments had the capability to send e-mail to all users in the company, and we were being slammed with messages,” says Falk. “People had no way to sort out what was important to them. They became overwhelmed, and they just stopped reading e-mail.”
Compliance Issues
As a member of a federally regulated industry and a publicly traded company, El Paso must comply with strict guidelines that require increased disclosure of information to ensure greater transparency and accountability. That begins by keeping employees well informed about procedures, products, and processes. For example, compliance with the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which was created to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures, means that El Paso must follow strict rules for establishing an accounting oversight board, auditor independence, corporate responsibility, and enhanced financial disclosure.
Compliance with U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regulations means that El Paso must limit the types of information that employees in its individual business units are allowed to see. FERC, which regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil to maintain fairness in the marketplace, mandates a strict division between natural gas transporters and their marketing affiliates.
Because El Paso has both transmission and marketing functions, FERC regulations in effect divide El Paso Corporation into two companies: One is regulated, and that company controls interstate natural gas pipelines; the other is nonregulated, and that company controls the exploration, production, and marketing of natural gas and oil. “Because our pipelines are regulated by FERC, we have to restrict the flow of information between our regulated and nonregulated companies,” Falk says. “Employees in the two companies are not allowed to share information.”
Sending vast amounts of corporate information to disparate field offices by e-mail, while restricting access to compliance-related information to the regulated company within the corporation, created continual bandwidth and storage issues for El Paso’s IT department. Group Web sites, including those for the Human Resources, Public Relations, and Ethics departments, were added to the company’s intranet in an attempt to centralize information, but doing so generated additional expenses because outside developers were hired to build and maintain the sites.
Solution
Following that company meeting, El Paso’s CEO issued a directive to improve employee communications, and the Public Relations department, working closely with IT, created a committee to address the problem. The committee’s goal was to unify and engage employees by using people, tools, and technology to get “the right information to the right people at the right time.”
The challenge for El Paso was to create an effective employee communications solution that office and field employees would actually use to access and receive corporate information, and that would also eliminate the flood of large e-mail attachments. Such a solution would need to meet the needs of the company’s regulated and nonregulated businesses as well as satisfy compliance and regulatory requirements.
Developing the Strategy
Falk and her department formed what they called a “blue sky” communications team to research options and develop a strategy for streamlining, consolidating, and improving employee communications. “We called it the ‘blue sky’ team because we wanted to identify all the features we would like to have, as if limitations didn’t exist,” she says.
The “blue sky” team developed a three-step strategy:
- Give employees “anytime access” to corporate information in a single centralized location.
- Develop a limited “push” component in the form of a single weekly e-mail digest of the news that could be sent to all.
- Explore emerging technologies, including podcasts and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, to develop “intelligent push” capabilities in the future.
Once this strategic approach was established, El Paso still needed to develop a technology solution to support it. When Internet Information Services (IIS) Administrators Scott Bittinger and John Martínez first suggested using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server as the core of the employee communications solution, Falk and her team were enthusiastic. “When our team understood what the technology could offer and how it could help us improve employee communications, we became SharePoint advocates.”
Designing and Implementing the Solution
With the help of Microsoft Services, El Paso created a small server farm configuration to support its SharePoint Portal Server solution, with two front-end Web servers, an index and job server, and a back-end database server.
“It took about a day to set up the server farm,” Bittinger says. “Microsoft walked us through the implementation and helped us design an infrastructure that was right for our environment.”
The company supports 8,000 personal computers and now has approximately 230 active SharePoint team sites. The company also created four SharePoint portals: one each for its regulated and nonregulated businesses, a third for its shared services business unit, and the fourth to serve as the corporate intranet.
The four portals, which are loaded onto the two Web servers, are necessary to satisfy the regulatory requirement that information related to one part of the business remain unavailable to employees in other parts of the company. To help ensure the integrity of that system, Microsoft developed an Internet server application programming interface (ISAPI) filter for El Paso, which provides increased security for information on the individual portals by strengthening user authenticity.
“With the extra security filter in place, even if we were to grant someone in the regulated business permission to view information on the nonregulated business portal, the system would challenge the user when he or she tried to log on,” Martínez says.
Central to the program’s launch was the training component, ensuring that El Paso employees could download information from the company self-service intranet. The training that Microsoft consultants delivered on SharePoint Portal Server provided the confidence and know-how that the El Paso staff needed. “Microsoft is very supportive of our business needs,” Bittinger adds. “The Microsoft consultants shared their experience and expertise with us, and we now have a solution that works very well.”
Benefits
El Paso’s choice of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enabled the firm to create an internal communication solution that empowers employees to collaborate by providing timely information, on demand, from a central location. Company portals created with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 are easy to manage and cost-effective, and they make information compelling and accessible to users.
Unified, ControlledCommunication
The new internal communications portal gives El Paso more control over what employees see and makes information easier to update. Those benefits, in turn, help El Paso comply with the many regulations that govern the oil and gas industry.
Falk says that the new portal server will help El Paso retain corporate knowledge that is often lost when an employee leaves. “This collaborative solution will help us control access to corporate knowledge so we can build our knowledge base.”
Simplified Management
As part of their work, John Martínez and Scott Bittinger provide Internet Information Services support for El Paso’s regulated and nonregulated portals. Both agree that SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is easy to use and includes features that improve IT efficiency by making better use of staff time and resources, such as:
- Scalability. SharePoint Portal Server is built on a scalable, highly distributed architecture that will make it easy for El Paso to plan for future growth. “A great feature of SharePoint Portal Server is scalability. We can add another server anytime we want, which is good to know,” Bittinger says.
- Custom lists. SharePoint Portal Server made it easy for the El Paso IT group to customize its own internal team site to manage employee schedules. “Most things that can be put in a simple Microsoft SQL Server™ table and queried can be put in a SharePoint list,” Martínez explains. “We don’t need additional SQL Server training and we don’t need a developer to create the forms because we can do it ourselves in a matter of minutes.”
- Reduced bandwidth. Before SharePoint Portal Server, El Paso employees shared files by e-mail, which increased mailbox sizes and created storage issues. Now, instead of sending large files through e-mail, employees upload documents to the portal and send e-mail containing a link to the shared file’s location. “Because those large e-mail files were sent to thousands of desktops, SharePoint Portal Server gives us significant bandwidth savings,” Martínez says.
- Ease of use. SharePoint Portal Server makes it easy to create self-service portals that enable employees to manage their own sites. “Employees don’t need Web development skills to become administrators of their own team site,” Bittinger says. “After viewing the training materials that Microsoft provides, they can become administrators of a fully functional site within a few hours.”
- Increased IT staff productivity. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 can be deployed right away, without customization, so portal services such as search, SharePoint site management, topics, and news are available immediately. “Aside from setting up a new portal site and appointing an administrator, we need to provide very little technical support,” Bittinger says. “We point users to the online training, and they’re ready to get to work.”
Cost Savings
The new portal solution enables El Paso to save money that the company would normally spend on third-party vendors. “We needed a new database application that normally costs U.S.$25,000,” Bittinger says. “We saved that money by developing it in-house using SharePoint Portal Server.”
Targeted User Information
“When we make information available on the portal, we use the filtering and user profile functionality so that employees receive only information that pertains to them,” Falk says. “SharePoint Portal Server makes us much more sophisticated about targeting information and helps employees find what they need faster.
“People want to be engaged, and they want to move forward,” she adds. “SharePoint Portal Server 2003 will help our employees get the information they need and make more efficient use of time and technology.”
Future Plans
Falk says that El Paso plans to build on the success of the new company portal by continuing to add on-demand video, making it more convenient for field employees to see rich-media communications. For instance, she says, “We are investing in mobile devices that will further improve communication and collaboration for our field employees.”
“Every time we do a presentation about SharePoint Portal Server 2003, people love what they see,” Bittinger says, “and every day we see more requests for SharePoint sites. This solution sells itself.”
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