Real cost savings in action

As mentioned in my post of the 4 July BA saved £55 million last year so it was good to see its intranet today and get a sense of how these savings are made. On first look it seemed that not much had changed since I last had a tour in 2006 but whilst the design had changed little there is no access to more functions than before.

The BA intranet, or Employee Services Portal as they call it, is extremely task orientated. So the focus has been to move as much process and transactions as possible online. So far example, when staying in a hotel on an overnight stopover cabin crew can now arrange rosters and swap shifts. Online payslips are now compulsory - there is no option to receive a paper copy in the post. An great example of a real saving in postage, paper and production costs for 42,000 employees each month.

A recent new area is 'Action for survival' which aims to help BA get through the recession. This houses forums for employees to generate ideas and Q and As on money saving measures such as the recently announced unpaid leave/work initiative.

It was noticeable that design has not changed much in 3 years and there is little evidence of Enterprise 2.0. No blogs or wikis and the forums are 'traditional' rather than Yammer style. Despite this the intranet remains extremely popular with around 23,000 accessing each day and over 98% of employees accessing at least once per month.

So functions and task do seem to the driving force behind this intranet which is more than paying its way for BA.