Nandita Gurjar, Senior Vice President and Group Head, Human Resources, Infosys

Nandita Gurjar, Senior Vice President and Group Head, Human Resources, Infosys



Customer Solution Case Study
/ Infosys Uses Social Media to Engage Employees and Increase Competitive Edge

“Infy Bubble helps employees have a sense of belonging in a huge global corporation, and happy employees give us a competitive edge.”

Nandita Gurjar, Senior Vice President and Group Head, Human Resources, Infosys

Infosys wanted to create a social media platform to foster employee interaction and boost job satisfaction. It used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to create Infy Bubble, where employees share both personal and work information. The IT staff created the site in just five months, and more than 80,000 employees created Bubble profiles in the first four months. Ultimately, social media could contribute to better customer solutions.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published May 2012


Business Needs

Infosys is a large consulting, engineering, and outsourcing firm based in India, with 150,000 employees working from 64 offices and 68 development centers around the world. As Infosys has grown, its workforce has become younger, with a median age of 27 years. In India’s booming economy, young workers are constantly seeking new opportunities and changing jobs.

To keep workers engaged and excited to be at Infosys, and also to help them form a sense of family in such a large organization, Infosys wanted to build an internal social networking site—something similar to Facebook or Twitter for Infosys. “We wanted to give employees a way to connect and share not only work information but personal interests, and also give management a way to listen to employee views,” says Ramesh G., Delivery Manager for Information Systems at Infosys.

In mid-2010, Infosys was preparing to modernize its corporate intranet and decided to add a social media component. Its existing intranet was built on an old code base that made content publishing difficult and offered no interactivity. Infosys needed an Internet development environment with strong social media capabilities.

Solution

Infosys realized that it needed to look no further than Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. “Most of our custom applications are based on Microsoft technologies, and we were already impressed with the ability of SharePoint Server to run our corporate website,” Ramesh G. says. “We also saw that SharePoint was a great platform for social computing.”

In four months, Infosys created a new intranet called Sparsh, Sanskrit for “touch.” Sparsh is the home base for all employees, providing company news and one-click access to many corporate applications. The content publishing group uses SharePoint templates to quickly create new content and SharePoint workflows to automate approvals. The group can prepare information ahead of time and tag it with the publication date, and then SharePoint Server publishes it automatically. Employees can leave comments on Sparsh articles and have coworkers automatically notified.

As soon as Sparsh was complete, Infosys started developing Infy Bubble, its social media site, which it launched for employees in India in May 2011. Through Infy Bubble, employees can share their views, photos, videos, and blog posts with fellow employees. They can talk about work or about life outside of work. There are groups to discuss poetry, sports, Indian pop stars, enterprise architecture, and SharePoint Server.

Infosys uses Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to provide intelligent search for both Sparsh and Infy Bubble. Employees can search discussion sites, communities, blogs, wikis, status updates, and documents. Bubble also provides a people search function, which lets employees find other employees based on their expertise, location, or other parameters.

Employees can create their own watch lists in Infy Bubble, which show all messages containing a keyword. Employees can also set Bubble profile privacy settings to determine which parts of their profiles can be searched and shared.

Microsoft Services provided the high-level design, architecture design, and support for both sites. Infosys uses Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 data management software as the database for both.

Benefits

With Infy Bubble and Sparsh, Infosys has increased employee engagement and sped content publishing. It took the IT staff only a few months to create these sites, which Infosys hopes will contribute to better customer solutions.

Higher Employee Satisfaction

Within four months of its launch in India, Bubble had more than 80,000 profiles and 300,000 connections. In March 2012, Infosys expanded Bubble to sites outside of India. “Because we have such a young workforce, we have to come up with creative ways to engage them,” says Nandita Gurjar, Senior Vice President and Group Head of Human Resources at Infosys. “Infy Bubble helps employees have a sense of belonging in a huge global corporation, and happy employees give us a competitive edge. Bubble also gives management a pulse on the organization, helping them know how employees are feeling.”

Faster Content Publishing to Intranet

Instead of taking a couple of hours to get content created, reviewed, and published to its intranet, Infosys can now publish content in 15 minutes, which keeps content fresher. Because SharePoint Server content publishing does not require a high level of technical skill, Infosys was able to create versions of Sparsh for each business unit and have local staff update and manage their own content. These local sites have the same look, feel, and capabilities as the corporate Sparsh site.

Four-Month Delivery Period, Easy Enhancement

Infosys took full advantage of the rich out-of-box functionality in SharePoint Server to create Sparsh in four months and Infy Bubble in five months. “Our development time was limited to customizing the user interface,” says Gaurav Kumar, Group Project Manager of Information Systems at Infosys. “We are busy enhancing Sparsh and Bubble with new capabilities, such as making mobile versions. SharePoint Server is very easy to extend in any direction.”

Potential for Better Customer Solutions

Ultimately, Infosys anticipates that easier and more frequent sharing of knowledge among employees can potentially help it build better solutions for customers. “Bubble gives employees a way to tap more talent and knowledge within the company,” says Ramesh G. “Employees have more confidence in information that is ‘crowd-sourced’ rather than disseminated from the top down.”

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published May 2012