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Motorola revved internal communication and collaboration by providing its 69,000 employees in 70 countries as well as 9,200 external partners with Web 2.0 tools to publish, maintain, and share content. Intranet 2.0, as Motorola calls the effort, includes bookmarking and tagging that lets users share knowledge company-wide. It provides social search technology that improves the quality of searches by injecting results that other users found most valuable. The company has RSS-enabled its entire knowledge repository, letting employees subscribe to content related to their work.

A whopping 92% of employees are using the tools. The company has 38 Tbytes of data in the system, including 5,400 blogs, 4,500 wikis, 65,000 social bookmarks, and 30 million shared documents. Its people add 90,000 documents a day.

Who wouldn't want on-call focus groups? That's what Southwest Airlines got when it took off into the blogosphere last year with its Nuts About Southwest blog as a place to develop a rapport with customers.

Employees use the blog to talk about what's going on at Southwest, giving customers an inside look at the airline. Customers respond, ask questions, and describe their experiences with the airline

and elsewhere. USS Blog Boy, for example, is on the sixth installment of his Deployment Diary, describing life on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

Discussions can morph into virtual focus groups, providing on-the-spot feedback. Case in point: When CEO Gary Kelly wrote a blog about the possibility of Southwest providing seat assignments on its planes as an alternative to its open seating approach, customers had a lot to say, and blog comments surged to their highest level ever.

At Accenture, customized microsites are improving communication with customers and driving sales. Working with the Internet marketing group, Accenture's IT group developed an infrastructure that lets teams of employees who work with customers launch microsites that serve as virtual platforms for sharing information with customers.

Using customizable templates, these teams generate content-rich, updatable microsites where information is shared in forums, discussion boards, downloadable content, podcasts, video streams, Flash animation, surveys, and collaborative work environments. The microsites have deepened existing client relationships by improving collaboration and efficiency, and they've also proved to be a good way to engage prospective clients by delivering highly tailored messages, while demonstrating a team-oriented approach with clients. Accenture expects to launch about 80 microsites this year and several hundred more over the next three years.

Until recently, Baylor Health Care System's Physician Portal could only be used by Baylor doctors to retrieve information. If they wanted to order procedures for patients, they had to pick up the phone. That changed with a recent electronic workflow project that lets non-Baylor physicians refer patients to Baylor's facilities and give them access to their patients' electronic medical records. This is important to physicians who don't have admitting privileges but want to remain informed about the course of treatment for their patients. The portal also was changed into a two-way communication tool—so physicians can order procedures for patients from various units in Baylor's hospitals and other facilities.

The project improved the quality of care by helping patients get procedures scheduled faster and letting physicians access critical information for more informed and timely decisions.

While the rest of the world was outsourcing, Heartland Payment Systems insourced its accounting and billing system. Over a three-year period, the payroll and credit and debit card transaction processor built the Passport application using Microsoft .Net, C#, and SQL Server. The result was $3 million in annual savings.

Heartland had been outsourcing the data delivery and processing cycles of its accounting and billing system but found that working with a service provider slowed responses to customers, held up information distribution, and prevented it from offering services like next-day funding. Outsourcing also limited the type of statement it could provide customers to whatever its outsourcer's standard option was. Heartland had to build systems to import and export data from its outsourcers' systems to make it available to customers.

With Passport, Heartland gets processing results sooner and answers questions and solves problems faster. It can activate new customers faster and provide personalized statement options and self-service tools. It's been able to lower customers' processing costs and offer next-day funding. In the program's first months, Heartland saw a 25% growth in customers.

Marriott's goal when it launched OnePath search on its Web site was clear: Get more site visitors to book rooms. More than 6 million customers a month spend about 1.5 million hours on Marriott.com. Seventy percent of them use the search function, yet before OnePath, half never booked a room. OnePath increased the conversion rate by 15%.

The search tool provides keyword search and guided navigation that uses clickable filters to narrow results and compare up to four hotels. It lets Marriott offer site visitors products and content relevant to what they're searching for.

Law firm Foley & Lardner developed Web-based software to match up two groups it often works with: startups in need of funding and venture capitalists looking for investment opportunities. The Private Equity Matchmaker tool pairs funding seekers and sources based on data Foley & Lardner attorneys enter into the system. It offers matches based on attributes such as transaction size, development stage, geographic region, and industry. When a match is identified, it shoots an e-mail to the attorneys who work with the potentially compatible clients. They then have an opportunity to make an introduction.

The system also ranks each startup and investor based on the amount of match activity they generate.

Not all IT efforts require a huge investment in fancy equipment. Graybar, a provider of electrical and telecommunications products and services, made cell phones and delivery tracking technology pay off.

Its drivers start and end deliveries by entering the time into their cell phones, capturing their location, too. They also use the phones to enter the last name of the person who signs for the delivery and to take pictures of the delivered items and the recipient's signature on the delivery form. Data is transmitted to a hosted Web site where it's downloaded into Graybar's SAP system. Employ- ees access the data integrated with SAP transactions and view delivery documents and packages on the Web. This approach has let Graybar improve collections and reduce customer claims of damaged merchandise.

The technology also lets Graybar more efficiently manage truck routes, resulting in more deliveries per route and a 15% decrease in overtime in the first four months of the year compared with a year ago.

Intermountain Healthcare was reluctant to go with VoIP or a wireless LAN in its hospitals because downtime comes at a high cost in health care. That changed with the opening this fall of its Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City. The 100-acre facility was built with the goal of providing at least one functioning communication system on every floor of its five specialty hospitals during a power outage or other problem.

Intermountain went with GE Healthcare's GE Enterprise Access universal wireless platform, which supports multiple wireless services over a common infrastructure. It has helped caregivers become more mobile and provides patients with wireless access.

Homebuilder Pulte Homes last year handed out more than 600 tablet PCs to its customer relations managers and saw immediate payoff. Each employee saved about two hours a day—300,000 hours annually—in time spent traveling and entering redundant data.

Before getting the tablets, employees traveled to customers' homes and took handwritten notes. They then returned to their offices, entered data into Pulte's eService system, printed the paperwork, and returned it to customers for signatures.

Now, the tablets, equipped with mobile eService apps, let them use touch screens to enter, access, and edit information; research customer concerns; and schedule follow-up appointments. The system also records electronic signatures when customers sign off on checklists and completed work.

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