Transcript
February 2005
Case Study Sun Equips for Site Quality and Brand Protection Company Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision – “The Network is the Computer” – has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. With presence in more than 100 countries, Sun’s need for timely business intelligence regarding their Websites is imperative.
Objectives In 2002, Scott McNealy, Sun’s chairman, CEO and president, issued an edict to implement quality controls for all of Sun’s webenabled content with the goal to improve overall customer service for Website visitors. Since individual business owners maintained their own public-facing sites, McNealy wanted an accountability mechanism for their timeliness and quality.
Summary Needs - Implement quality controls - Improve service for website visitors
Solution - Automated, enterprise site management application - Customizable reports include trends, summary and detailed
Results - Standard enterprise program with centralized reporting and oversight - Automated report delivery - Reduced complaints and improved site visitor ratings
Sun’s Internet Services Division, which is called iServices, coordinates information from some 250 employees corporate-wide who publish information to an estimated two million web pages that make up www.sun.com and its sub-sites. Since the iServices group is in a corporate oversight role, providing tools and means to help the various groups create, add and maintain their pages, it undertook the accountability task. Tagged the EQUIP program (Ensure Quality Improvement), the organization set some tough objectives for itself: Objectives
Requirements
- Institute executive website oversight - Implement standardized centralized quality metrics - Improve visitor experience ratings on the public site - Decrease site complaints-
- One-page reporting for C-level executives - Trending reports - Specific metrics for accessibility, quality, and search engine optimization (SEO)
Deployment Information for Sun.com Corporate Sites - 118 Scorecards produced weekly - 250 publishers receive reports
Table 1: Sun’s Website objectives and deliverables.
Business Processes As a Maxamine customer since 2000, iServices first started implementing quality standards early in the century by using a Maxamine application for ad-hoc Website link checking. As a first-adopter of Webenabling information and Internet technologies, Sun naturally rapidly matured to the next level. In 2002, it added a more holistic, managed approach that provided oversight, trending and executive reporting across all of their sites. With various organizations responsible for content, this dispersed environment required an enterprise solution that could produce information for each business unit in a customizable and easily accessible format. To avoid the time and cost of developing a tool in-house, they surveyed the marketplace for a suitable solution, and chose Maxamine Knowledge Platform for its flexibility, ability to run on multiple platforms – including Sun Solaris, of course – and easily accessible Web-based reports, which would replace the ad-hoc report previously used.
February 2005 The iServices team reviewed Maxamine Knowledge Platform’s functionality and recognized that it could easily scale to accommodate the more stringent oversight facing the iServices team. Maxamine representatives shared their Leaderboard concept, which compares metric scores over time, enabling companies to monitor and manage all Web sites from a central location. The team then evolved it into a full blown, enterprise-wide Web management interface now a vital component of EQUIP. Today, the iServices Division produces 118 weekly Scorecards and shares them with the 250 publishers across the organization who are responsible for their own updates and maintenance (See Table 2 for role descriptions). Sun also gathers “Voice of the Customer” (VOC) scores and comments via simple surveys on each Web page. The iServices team combines these subjective results with objective metrics from Maxamine Knowledge Platform to complete their analysis. “Maxamine’s objective metrics and VOC subjective feedback are two sides of the same coin. VOC feedback helps us prioritize problems, while Maxamine details let publishers identify specifically what to change,” observed Ed Meares, who leads the EQUIP team. Meares and his team are now able to develop a one-page executive summary illustrating the “health” of Sun’s web properties for their vice president of Internet Services and other C-level executives. Using the Leaderboard concept, corporate results are summarized on a single Web page, and then linked to department-level detailed reports. iServices personnel can monitor quality scores through the Leaderboard. They can see, at a glance, how each business unit is performing against others and what metrics are falling below benchmark thresholds within each unit. Since each department can see the others’ results, which plays off the employees’ competitive natures, teams tend to compete to improve. “The enterprise implementation of Maxamine Knowledge Platform has given us unparalleled control over the quality and effectiveness of our site,” said Meares. “The real key to the success of this program was in the way that Maxamine’s development team worked with us to solve problems. They really listen when we describe what we want to accomplish, then work collaboratively with us to get to a solution. It is rare to see this level of customer service from a vendor.”
Results With Maxamine Knowledge Platform site analysis software, Sun has minimized risk and improved site effectiveness associated with their web assets. As Sun’s needs grew, Maxamine’s solutions were there to fulfill them. They have: •
Implemented an enterprise-wide program for standardized and centralized quality control and to provide improved information to SUN executives and their staff.
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Implemented processes to monitor for compliance with intellectual property and copyright policies across the organization in order to minimize legal risk
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Combined objective and subjective site data, which has resulted in decreased site complaints and increased site effectiveness for better user experience
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Established “on-demand” reporting methods to serve both site owners/publishers and executive management to facilitate improved productivity and information dissemination.
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Automated report delivery to each of the 250 publishers, who use their reports to fix site problems, resulting in faster page load times, better link quality, better searchability and timely, relevant content. Reports provide exact pages and lines of code that need to be fixed.
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Improved experience ratings and reduced site complaints as a result of the new reporting process.
