4-page Case Study - Posted 11/25/2008
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Real Estate Firm Saves $500,000, Improves Service Delivery with Collaboration Solution
Jones Lang LaSalle had grown rapidly—and outgrown its tools for collaboration and content management. At the same time, an economic slowdown and global competition increased the company’s challenges. To fuel continued growth, Jones Lang LaSalle adopted a consistent solution for its intranet, client extranet, and Internet sites. Based on the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, including Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, the solution replaces flurries of e-mail messages with collaboration team workspaces that business units create and control themselves. Centralized enterprise content management reduces version control problems, eliminates the need to support storage of multiple document copies, and saves the company U.S.$500,000 per year. The solution was adopted with little or no customization required, containing development costs and speeding time-to-benefit.
Situation
Professional-service companies market their knowledge and expertise rather than sell tangible products—so employees need to be able to find, use, and share that knowledge and expertise with those who need it, when and where they need it.
Knowledge management and enterprise content management have been key to the success of Jones Lang LaSalle, a firm that provides comprehensive real estate and investment management expertise on local, regional, and global levels. Ten years ago, the company had about 3,000 employees in 100 locations. As the company grew through both internal expansion and acquisition, its means of sharing information among employees and with prospects, clients, and the public at large—its intranet and public Web sites—grew too, using a combination of technologies, including digital dashboards, Microsoft® Content Management Server, Windows® SharePoint® Services, Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Notes, and shared directories.
Eventually, Jones Lang LaSalle outgrew its decentralized approach to technology. Having grown to 30,000 employees in 700 cities in 60 countries, the less formal and less consistent means of communication and collaboration that sufficed for a smaller company were no longer enough. “The environment wasn’t integrated, it was difficult to update, and employees lost confidence in the information contained in the system,” says Gregory Adams, Senior Vice President, Global Information Technology, Jones Lang LaSalle. The company wanted to standardize on a single platform and optimize its business productivity infrastructure.
Limited Search and Collaboration Capabilities
At the same time, the rising price of oil, a slowing economy, and increasing global competition made it more important than ever for the company to use technology to increase collaboration for competitive advantage. However, there was no way for employees to identify experts in given locations or given fields of expertise. There was no enterprise search capability, which meant that employees had difficulty finding information if they didn’t already know where to look for it.
Collaboration was accomplished mainly through e-mail, which resulted in multiple versions of documents flying back and forth through the network, clogging inboxes and affecting bandwidth. The same document could be stored up to 30 times, on various desktop computer hard disk drives, in shared directories and document libraries, and other locations. Beyond the potential for inconsistency and error, the redundant storage of documents also meant the company had to maintain more hardware and use up more network bandwidth when communicating with mobile employees than it would otherwise have needed, driving up costs.
The decentralized system also made it possible for several teams to be working on the same issues, each unaware of the effort of the others.
Language Challenges
As Jones Lang LaSalle grew globally, it became increasingly important for the company to bridge the various native languages of its employees and customers. Unfortunately, the technologies that it used for internal communication and collaboration, as well as public communication with customers and others, weren’t designed to address that language need.
The company maintained content in Japanese, Chinese, French, German, and English—and each version of that content had to be built from scratch and then updated separately. As a result, updates didn’t always happen, and the company increasingly relied on only English-language content to communicate with employees and customers worldwide.
Site Reliability Issues
As the company’s intranet and Internet technologies continued to age, the sites became less reliable, experiencing outages and driving up help-desk costs. And with normal staff turnover in the IT department, there were fewer and fewer employees who knew how to manage the aging system.
“We needed a new way to find information and collaborate, and to communicate across the boundaries of language,” says Adams. “To drive down costs and ensure maximum effectiveness, we wanted a common set of easy-to-use, cost-effective technologies across our intranet, Internet, and extranet environments.”
Solution
To meet those needs, Jones Lang LaSalle adopted a collaboration and content management solution based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system, including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The solution provides the collaboration, search, and multilingual support that the company sought, and gives Jones Lang LaSalle one technology set to use as the foundation for what Adams calls the company’s “triplenet”: internal, extranet, and public sites.
Adams and his colleagues are rolling out the solution in phases, mostly using features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with no customization. The first phase has been replacing the company’s multiple portals and internal sites with a consistent enterprise solution that is viewed by all employees worldwide. This solution includes prominent global top-of-page messaging that allows principal information to be shared with all employees worldwide.
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The bottom line is that, with SharePoint sites, we can provide more effective client service to more clients. That’s the engine to support continued growth throughout our operations worldwide. |
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Gregory Adams
Senior Vice President, Global Information Technology, Jones Lang LaSalle |
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New Ways to Find Information
The solution provides new tools to help employees find and use information more quickly than they could before. For example, business-unit pages, available from the global intranet site, provide a comprehensive overview of parts of the Jones Lang LaSalle operation that employees may not have known about before. The business-unit pages explain each business’s operations and provide contact information for key staff throughout the unit.
The solution also includes an “I Need to Find” drop-down list that provides a fast way for employees to access frequently requested information, such as office locations, corporate resources, travel information, and human resources forms. This information is tailored according to an employee’s location and role, as identified in the employee’s Active Directory® service account, making information more secure because, for example, junior employees do not see information intended only for senior employees.
Jones Lang LaSalle takes advantage of the MySites feature in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to collect information on the experience, clients, training, and other background of its personnel. “MySites is our corporate equivalent of Facebook or MySpace,” says Adams.
It’s also a key resource for identifying needed expertise in the company, anywhere in the world. The people search capability of Office SharePoint Server 2007 accesses the MySites information to enable employees to locate the right colleagues with specific areas of expertise. For example, if an employee in Dallas needs to find out if colleagues in the London office have knowledge of key market trends, they can quickly locate a resident expert, rather than trying to hunt down peers who may or may not know this information, or sending an e-mail message to a large audience of nontargeted employees and clogging up the network.
Beyond these resources, employees needed a comprehensive enterprise search capability to find content regardless of where it is stored in the intranet. Jones Lang LaSalle considered but rejected a solution based on Google search. “Everyone knows the Google brand, but it just doesn’t have the integration with Office SharePoint Server that we needed,” says Riaan van der Merwe, Global Architect, Jones Lang LaSalle. “We keep so much of our content in SharePoint site lists, and Google doesn’t search lists—that was a huge limitation for us.”
Instead, the company uses Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007. In addition to providing comprehensive searching of the company’s intranet content, SharePoint Server 2007 takes advantage of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 to enhance its searches. For example, document properties associated with a Microsoft Office 2007 document, spreadsheet, or presentation file are automatically tagged as searchable metadata by SharePoint Server 2007, giving Jones Lang LaSalle employees an easy way to refine their searches for more useful results.
Technologies for Collaboration
Jones Lang LaSalle is enhancing collaboration among employees by using other Office SharePoint Server 2007 technologies. For example, employees can use team sites to establish virtual workspaces for temporary projects or ongoing activities, without having to rely on the IT department. In a year, employees have created more than 3,000 such sites, all consistent with the company’s intranet hierarchy structure and governance policies. Many of the governance policies have been in place for years, but were refined to reflect new technologies and uses including collaboration, social networking, and globalization.
Employees also collaborate by checking Microsoft Office files in and out of document libraries, eliminating the problem of multiple copies of files and version control challenges. This is especially useful for collaborating with mobile workers and across international boundaries. Files are shared in a central location rather than being sent back and forth through e-mail across continents.
The company is conducting a pilot test of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, which will deliver presence information to employees. Once deployed, the presence capability will enable employees to check the availability of colleagues identified in people search, on team sites, and as document authors, and to immediately initiate an instant messaging session with them.
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Compared with the previous intranet portal, called Delphi, (top),
the redesigned page (bottom) provides region-specific information
and greater navigation capabilities. | |
Support for Multilingual Publishing
To address the language needs of users of its intranet and public-facing Web sites, Jones Lang LaSalle is using the multilingual support in Office SharePoint Server 2007. For example, team members can take advantage of the site variation management system to link content in related sites. When content is changed in one page of a site that is linked to other sites through variations, the corresponding sites are also updated with the new content. This enables the company’s non-English sites to be updated more quickly and thus more frequently to keep them current with the company’s English-language sites.
Powerful Customer Extranet
When Jones Lang LaSalle fully deploys its client-facing extranet next year, it will enable customers to receive comprehensive information on the status of their business with the firm. In addition, the firm is making use of technologies that deliver up-to-date information on Web pages, provide at-a-glance dashboards, and pull data from other business systems within the company for display and use within SharePoint sites for a business intelligence solution. As a result, Jones Lang LaSalle expects to increase its ability to attract and retain high-value customers.
Benefits
Jones Lang LaSalle is supporting increased collaboration, centralized enterprise content management, and increased productivity for both business units and IT staff—and meeting its business goals to expand revenues and worldwide markets cost-effectively—thanks in part to the way that it has adopted Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Collaboration Tools Support Continued Growth
“Perhaps the biggest benefit our employees have gained from the new solution is the ability to create their own team collaboration sites,” says Adams.
Jones Lang LaSalle employees can now create team sites on their own and do so more quickly than they could through the former process, which required them to go through the IT department. Contributors are empowered with the ability to control the access and content of these sites on their own. Previously, they were limited to File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites that were more difficult create and less functional to use.
A team has the ability to create a single, centralized location to share project documents and best practices, and to discuss client issues—even among virtual team members who can be located anywhere in the world.
Team members have a range of new tools and capabilities for collaboration, including the ability to check documents in and out of libraries, use wikis (Web applications designed to allow multiple authors to add, remove, and edit content), and communicate with colleagues more efficiently through presence information tied to instant messaging.
“The bottom line is that, with SharePoint sites, we can provide more effective client service to more clients,” says Adams. “That’s the engine to support continued growth throughout our operations worldwide.”
Enterprise Content Management Boosts Productivity, Saves $500,000 Yearly
By replacing files sent in e-mail and multiple versions of stored documents with easily discoverable and searchable document libraries, Jones Lang LaSalle is doing more than enhancing collaboration among its employees. It’s also increasing the productivity of its IT operation and saving about U.S.$500,000 per year—freeing resources to support the company’s continued growth.
Adams estimates that centralizing enterprise content management through the new solution cuts bandwidth consumption by 40 percent. Reduced storage needs have helped decrease the number of servers required for document management by 67 percent. The company saves about $250,000 per year on reduced hardware, and another $250,000 per year on reduced maintenance. The reduction in hardware, and the reduction in energy needed to support that hardware, helps the company to contribute to environmental sustainability. Outages connected with enterprise content management sites are down by 84 percent, which has contributed to a reduction in help-desk tickets of 10 percent.
“Because our enterprise content management and collaboration systems are more reliable, productive, and cost-effective, we’ve been able to support the company’s rapid business growth without growing the IT staff,” says Adams. “With the help of Office SharePoint Server 2007, IT has the potential to be a greater contributor to profitability than ever before.”
International Web Traffic Up 100 Percent
It’s not just intranet participants who have benefited from the capabilities enabled by the new solution; visitors to the company’s public-facing sites have benefitted, as well. Bread-crumb navigation, search, easily discoverable features and content, and a consistent, attractive design all make the public site easier and more productive for clients, prospective clients, and other visitors.
Jones Lang LaSalle also has expanded its non-English language sites and kept them up to date. “Our ability to reach out to international, non-English–speaking audiences in their native languages has increased dramatically,” says Adams.
And those audiences have noticed. A marketing goal to increase international traffic to the public sites by 20 percent was quickly exceeded—traffic is now on track for a 100 percent annual increase. Inquiries from international audiences are up as well, and Adams anticipates that the greater traffic and inquiries will soon translate into increased business and revenues.
“Our company has a clear mission to expand its global service to customers—and Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key tool in achieving that mission,” says David Johnson, Chief Information Officer, Jones Lang LaSalle.
Capabilities Delivered with Minimal Customization
Adams and his colleagues wanted major enhancements to the company’s collaboration and enterprise content management capabilities without a major increase in development and maintenance budgets. Office SharePoint Server 2007 enabled them to meet that goal, too.
“It was crucial that we deliver new features for enterprise content management and collaboration without the need for custom code that would slow development, increase costs, and complicate the continuing management of our intranet and public Web site,” says Adams. “Many of our new features, such as team collaboration sites, are 100 percent Office SharePoint Server 2007 features out of the box, with no modification. Many others required only minor configuration or readily adopted third-party extensions.”
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Jones Lang LaSalle products and services, call (312) 782-4339 or visit the Web site at:
www.joneslanglasalle.com
