IBM is planning a big push into the Employee Relationship Management
intranetjournal.com
IBM is making a big push into the e-Workplace market, launching a new practice that will leverage much of the application development work it has done internally with its own massive intranet.
The new practice will focus on providing global companies with a wide range of applications and technologies that will help automate many common workplace processes, from employee self-service benefit applications, to e-learning and virtual collaboration.
IBM has big hopes for the new practice and is dedicating close to 2,000 consultants and 300 researchers to the effort. Industry research firm Gartner estimates the e-workplace market could be worth $12 billion in 2002, rising to as much as $53 billion by 2005. By 2006, the research firm believes that close to 80 percent of companies with e-business operations will have included an e-workplace program into their IT infrastructure.
"IBM is sharing the transformative tools that have helped us become a world-class e-business," says Ralph Senst, vice president of e-Business Collaboration Solutions for IBM Global Services. "IBM's own e-workplace efforts have fundamentally changed the way our employees work."
IBM says it has been able to achieve a number of cost savings and benefits from its own intranet-based e-workplace applications. Examples of these benefits and savings include the following:
· The company estimates it was able to achieve $6.2 billion in savings between 1998 and 2001 by deploying a series of e-care, e-procurement, and e-learning applications.
· Approximately 43 percent of all employee training was done via e-learning in 2001, resulting in savings of about $395 million.
· In 2001, 88 percent of U.S. employees who signed up for health care benefits did so via the corporate intranet, resulting in more than $1 million in savings.
· IBM's online corporate yellow pages gets more than one million hits per day, and saves an estimated 400,000 hours in productivity each year.
· About two-thirds of IBM employees use instant messaging. More than two million messages are sent each day.
· The IBM intranet homepage gets about 550,000 visits every weekday, or about 150 million visits per year.
· IBM employees conduct 4,800 e-meetings (Web conferences) each month.
It is benefits like these that IBM now hopes to be able to pass on to customers. |
