General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM), the world’s largest automaker, has been the global industry sales leader for 75 years. The intranet is a unifying force in massive, sprawling enterprise that employs about 327,000 people in 33 countries.
In 1999, the intranet was in fact a large, sprawling collection of many, many hundreds of websites and applications. Through the early part of the 21st century GM began creating functional portals for different business units. However, since the late 90s the focus of GM’s intranet has been on reducing the complexity of a massive and diverse environment and the drive towards a single, personalized portal called mySocrates.
The move to a single, personalized portal is driven by Communications, IS&S and Human Resources stakeholders in the form of a Global Web Steering Team.
The goals of the portal include[1]:
- Extended user access
- Single sign on
- Profiles and directories
- Governance teams
- Reuse of solutions
- Eliminate (reduced) cost
- Improved image
In 2001, GM created the new intranet home page, Socrates. Any person with access to the GM network can view Socrates. There is no personalization; everyone sees the same content and tools. Those that have access can login to mySocrates, the personalized portal. Unlike the static website that is Socrates, mySocrates pulls content from many different sources and repositories.
When the new Socrates debuted in May 2006, monthly logins increased 20% to more than 543,000. The portal has more than 100,000 active users including 40% of the hourly workforce.
The added challenge of making a portal relevant in 33 different countries and multiple languages is the process of integrating all of the regional requirements and concerns so that it is not something that is merely driven by HQ in Detroit. Challenges include[2]:
- Local, regional & global web content hosted in disparate locations
- using a wide-range of web authoring tools
- Non value-added time searching and navigating multiple portals and
- websites
- Redundancy and inconsistency with individuals/groups creating their
- own solutions including global, regional, local interpretations of content
- Difficult & costly to maintain up-to-date content & navigation
- Difficult to integrate processes and technology
- Limited personalized delivery and no re-usability across sites
The personalized portal looks to overcome many of these challenges with a governance model that engages and represents interests at various levels. While Communications, HR and IS&S continue to be the intranet owner champions, Regional Leaders of HR, IS&S, and Communications oversee deployment within regions and sectors of GM. Not only can users personalize mySocrates, but the portal is available in multiple languages.
Today, the portal focuses on the “one company” philosophy and primarily consists of announcements, news, links, & historical “static” information. The new working environment while in its infancy with bigger plans for the future has realized some real value including:
- 411.1M combined visits/hits
- 1.1M transactions with 98.1% online usage
- $17.4M combined soft/hard dollar cost savings
- $170K lost savings due to manual transactions
- GMID Password Reset Cost decreased 19% since January ’06
- Initial myJobs Tab has resulted in $1m in annual savings
Immediate plans for the future and the next generation (‘generation four’) of the portal include:
- Full cross-functional integration of work related processes
- Collaboration tools (e.g. wikis and blogs)
- Detailed data and reporting (e.g. business intelligence)
- Multiple platform delivery (e.g. wireless / PDA)
While GM has come a long way with their intranet, a lot more work is required – a process that will take years. The mySocrates portal is not in itself a benchmark in innovation, but it demonstrates how difficult it is to create a valued, unified environment in a traditionally decentralized company of many, many different cultures if all the far flung corners of the globe. GM has done well in creating a “one company” intranet that in comparison puts them far ahead of the pack amongst their many Fortune 500 colleagues.
