Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Unisys Implements Portal Solution to Enhance Knowledge Transfer and Reuse
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Professional Services
Customer Profile
Unisys provides information technology services and solutions to more than 100 countries worldwide. Headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, the company reported 2004 sales of U.S.$5,820.7 million.
Business Situation
With global operations serving six vertical industries, Unisys needed to increase employee access to resources and boost collaboration among teams.
Solution
Unisys implemented Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services as a knowledge management and collaboration solution.
Benefits
Improved access to information
Boosted collaboration
Reduced time-to-market
Eliminated duplicate efforts
Integrated with existing Microsoft environment / “The collaboration capabilities within SharePoint really enhance business processes, especially when you have employees and clients in different geographic regions.”
Kevin Sheetz, Vice President and Partner, Global Operations, Unisys Corporation
Unisys Corporation, a worldwide provider of IT services and solutions, wanted to improve knowledge management, particularly among its frontline sales and services people. Because of its size and global reach, the company stores information in many different locations. It needed a better way to transfer knowledge among employees, and to capture and reuse business documents and best practices. Unisys implemented Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 as its enterprisewide document management and collaboration solution. As a result of the implementation, the company has improved employee access to information and boosted online collaboration among geographically dispersed teams.
Situation
Unisys Corporation is a worldwide IT services and solutions company that provides consulting, systems integration, outsourcing, infrastructure, and server technology. The company employs approximately 37,000 people worldwide to service six primary vertical markets: public sector, financial services, communications, transportation, commercial, and media.
Unisys uses a methodology called blueprinting to create an actual map of client operations. The map allows clients to link business strategy to business processes, IT architecture, and solutions. Called 3D Visible Enterprise (3D-VE), the service entails heavy use of templates, documents, best practices, and technical documentation. Unisys needed to provide its sales and services people with more effective tools for sharing and reusing that information. The company wanted to reuse information so that it could save time, reduce costs, and maintain consistency across geographies and vertical markets.
The very features—size and worldwide presence—that give Unisys the power to reuse existing knowledge on a large scale also hindered effective sharing. “We’re a global, geographically dispersed company, and we need to bring the best people and ideas together to solve clients’ problems,” says Paul Rehmet, Program Manager of Knowledge Management for Unisys Industries and Competencies.
“People knew that the expertise they needed existed within Unisys, but it was difficult for them to find it quickly and easily,” adds Art Gregory, Director of Strategic Marketing and Knowledge Management for Unisys.
Recognizing that it needed a better way to capture information and collaborate, Unisys created a team to develop a comprehensive knowledge management solution. The team sought a single, easy-to-use product for creating online repositories of vital information that could be filtered and accessed based on the context within which the information would be used. The company also wanted to construct a virtual space in which teams could collaborate. Finally, the product had to be deployed as an enterprisewide application to adhere to the company’s broad IT vision.
“We really needed to find a mechanism to connect different parts of the business together, so we could share intellectual property and best practices,” says Kevin Sheetz, Vice President and Partner of Global Operations for Unisys. “We knew it could help us deliver better solutions in a more cost-effective manner.”
Solution
When Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 was released, the company was quick to build a demonstration model—and was not disappointed with the results. Using a phased approach, Unisys first rolled out the solution to its sales teams for three vertical industries. Then, the company extended the portal to the rest of its vertical markets, as well as toother groups within the organization; a process it is still undergoing.
Today, Unisys uses SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which is part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, to enable strategic communities focused on knowledge capture and reuse. Department and project teams can also set up virtual collaboration rooms in which updated documents, project plans, to-do lists, and calendars are posted for employees to update as needed. The solution runs on the Unisys ES7000 server computer, which allows the company to run and operate its enterprise environment from a single, centralized data center. Eventually, the company aims to offer the solution to strategic partners and customers. “This is one of the largest single-system implementations of SharePoint,” says Michael Ferreri, General Manager of Microsoft’s Greater Pennsylvania district. “Unisys created a knowledge management infrastructure that is truly a fundamental part of its business.”
Unisys Makes SharePoint Products and Technologies a Central Feature of Its Intranet
SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services, a component of the Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, power the company’s knowledge management infrastructure. Employees enter the system at U-Net, the company’s intranet gateway, which resides on SharePoint Portal Server and offers general company information and updated news from live feeds. With the Active Directory® service, users are recognized by SharePoint Portal Server, which eliminates the need for employees to sign in again. SharePoint Portal Server also is tightly integrated with other Microsoft products. For example, users can send e-mail messages using the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client,without ever leaving the portal.
From U-Net, employees can choose which types of information interest them—organized by country or by department. Different groups are using the portal to share distinct types of information, but all the information is cross-referenced and can be accessed through U-Net.
Unisys Makes the Portal Available to Different Teams
Whether working on a proposal or on a customer engagement, employees can work collaboratively using the team room feature of SharePoint Portal Server. Many teams use the discussion board feature to talk about issues, and users have developed rules for documents under review.
Unisys has extended the solution throughout the organization. For example, the Finance department uses the portal to store and share all the documentation associated with its Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. (Sarbanes-Oxley is a set of U.S.government regulations that require companies to maintain accurate documentation in case of an audit.) And the Human Resources department uses the portal to support developing courseware for UnisysUniversity, a company program that provides training to Unisys employees around the globe.
Department and project teams can now set up virtual collaboration rooms in which updated documents, project plans, to-do lists, and calendars are posted for employees to update as needed. The solution also enables employees to customize the collaboration rooms to their needs. For example, many proposal teams have started posting account wins in addition to their other materials, while the Finance department needed to be able to boost its room’s security with Active Directory controls to ensure that only authorized employees could access the financial data.
Unisys Puts Valuable Resources at Its Employees Fingertips
Unisys has also incorporated information on employees who can act as resources. That informationis displayed when people conduct a search. Using the SharePoint Portal Server MySite feature, each employee in the company has a page that lists areas of expertise and experience, important documents, contact information, and where the person fits into the organization. So, in addition to displaying pertinent documents, the system will also show people who have worked on similar documents or have expertise in particular areas.
Benefits
By using SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services, Unisys has restructured its knowledge management system. As a result, employees have better access to resources and new ways to collaborate. Not only is this new accessibility improving productivity and allowing information to be reused, it is also helping the company streamline workflow and improve business processes.
Improved Access to Information
With the new portal, Unisys employees are able to access useful information in a fraction of the time it took in the past. Now, instead of spending hours looking for existing documents or recreating them from scratch, employees and teams view up-to-date materials. And in cases where the materials do not yet exist, employees now have immediate access to subject matter experts who can advise them. “Now that we have SharePoint, people are telling us they’re finding information and expertise faster than they have ever been able to in the past,” says Rehmet.
Dee Anne Kotzur-Cerruti, Program Manager for Global Infrastructure Services for Unisys, adds that one of the benefits of the portal is that employees now find it easier to keep information current. “We’re seeing a real change in behavior,” she says. “SharePoint is making it so easy to share and collaborate that people don’t even realize they are doing it. It has just become the way we work at Unisys.”
Boosted Collaboration
For Unisys, SharePoint Portal Server has added a virtual meeting place where members can post documents, manage issues, tasks, and post calendars so everyone is working and collaborating around the same set of documents. “SharePoint does a very good job of integrating structured content and document management with the looser aspects of collaboration,” Rehmet explains. “Information gets captured as teams are creating it. Now there’s no bottleneck of content administration.”
Since Unisys implemented the solution, the popularity of SharePoint Portal Server has continued to rise. Within six months of the initial deployment, Unisys employees had created hundreds of communities that range from employees in the Finance department managing Sarbanes-Oxley compliance to consultants creating proposals together.
Lee Beyer, Director of the Knowledge Network Program for Unisys, says, “Since we implemented SharePoint, we’ve seen a huge rise in the amount of collaborative work being done online.”
Reduced Time-to-Market
The collaborative environment has reduced the amount of time it takes to complete projects, which has enabled the company to go after and support more new engagements. “With SharePoint, we’re clearly reducing cycle times by getting the right information and expertise to the people who need it, in time and in appropriate context,” says Beyer.
This is a benefit that all employees see.
Roy Hendl, Director of Operations for UnisysUniversity, agrees that the SharePoint Portal Server solution brings together the appropriate resources. “You can get the right people involved in the development and design of training curricula, instead of trying to get people all in one place for five days,” says Hendl.
The knowledge management portal has become a key tool in the company’s efforts to serve customers. The blueprinting best practice that Unisys employs involves a knowledge repository representing Unisys intellectual capital. The extensive library of core models enables faster blueprint development, resulting in faster implementations. With the portal, Unisys employees have been able to focus on working with customers, rather than learning complex new technology or searching for the right resources—be they information or expertise.
Eliminated Multiple Information Repositories and Databases
One of the key reasons Unisys had looked at reengineering its knowledge management was that a lot of information at the company existed, but it wasn’t easily available to other groups. Because the portal acts as a central repository of information, this data is now posted in a common repository, regardless of department or physical location. And for the company, this has translated into the elimination of duplicate efforts that wasted time and money.
For the Human Resources department, for example, there are clear advantages to maintaining educational courseware materials on its SharePoint site. “There are regional differences in training, and SharePoint boosts awareness of what is happening around the world,” says Hendl. “So now, if Australia has a training program and the United Kingdom needs a similar one, we avoid duplicating that work.”
Integrated with Existing Microsoft Environment
Employees benefit from a solution that is easy to use because SharePoint Portal Server works with the Microsoft Office tools they are already accustomed to using. For example, a consultant can send a collaboration request to team members directly from Outlook 2003, or send an e-mail or instant message that uses the Address Book feature from Outlook while they are working in the portal solution. Similarly, they can open or save a Microsoft Office Word 2003 or Microsoft Office Excel® 2003 document. One sales group even collects questions and discussion points using the bulletin board feature, which is then revised and sent to the customer as a Word 2003 document. “SharePoint gives people a seamless way to do what they want to do,” says Rehmet. “It’s almost like the line blurs whether you’re working in Outlook or Word or SharePoint. SharePoint doesn’t feel like a separate product.”
Reduced E-mail
Unisys has been making a concerted effort to reduce its amount of e-mail traffic and bandwidth, especially when that e-mail is an update or is not critical to a person’s day-to-day business. For example, many different groups have mass distribution lists on a certain topic. That information may be relevant for employees, but it still clogs their e-mail inboxes with information that needs to be read and then filed. With SharePoint Portal Server, the company has succeeded in ensuring that information is available but not burdensome. “Many of our groups now use the discussion board feature within SharePoint to post questions and answers instead of e-mailing them back and forth,” says Kotzur-Cerruti. “This reduces employees’ administrative work now that they no longer have to sort through as many e-mail messages.”
Employees also send links to documents stored in SharePoint Portal Server rather than attaching the documents themselves. As a result, the company has reduced issues associated with having multiple versions of the same document, and eliminated long download times.
Enhanced Business Processes
Because one of the primary goals of the portal solution was to share expertise and existing data, Unisys is changing its business processes to include SharePoint Products and Technologies in managing its best practices repositories. “We see SharePoint as being an infrastructure-level solution that we will use to capture all reusable experiences and information,” says Rehmet. “Going forward, any materials that might be helpful to someone else will automatically land in SharePoint.”
Unisys has already seen certain processes evolve. For example, employees within one Knowledge Management team use technology applications that require technical support. The support group has created a portalarea in which the employees can fill out a support request form and then be linked to an online survey. With the real-time information from the survey, the support group has improved its services and ensured that geographically dispersed employees still get effective technical support. Sheetz sees this as just one example that will eventually permeate the entire company. “At this point, knowledge management is an essential part of the corporation’s success, and every decision or project we initiate now will take this into account,” he says. “The collaboration capabilities within SharePoint really enhance business processes, especially when you have employees and clients in different geographic regions.”
Reliable IT Platform
Running SharePoint Portal Server on a Unisys ES7000 with the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system provides a stable and highly available environment to support collaborative computing and improved information access. The ES7000 server-based platform, which scales up to 32 processors, handles large and growing information stores while employing high-performance Intel processors to meet extensive transaction-processing requirements. This creates an environment that can readily support additional concurrent users and the extended use of SharePoint Portal Server.
“Deploying the SharePoint portal on a Unisys ES7000 platform has provided our users with the performance and reliability they demand coupled with the ability, companywide, to share knowledge and collaborate at a lower TCO [total cost of ownership] than an alternative scale-out approach. The ES7000 also provides ample capacity for expected growth,” says Rao Bhamidipati, Director of Enterprise Systems Architecture and Support in Unisys IT Department. “We can now leverage our own experience running SharePoint in an ES7000 server environment to our customers’ benefit.”
Microsoft Windows Server System