/ Wipro Connects People for Faster Solution Delivery; Only Two Months of Development
“Konnect provides instant access to experts for all our employees, thereby ensuring faster resolution and better solutions for customers.”
Ved Prakash, Chief Knowledge Officer, Wipro Technologies
As a global IT services giant with 100,000 employees, Wipro knows a lot; but, finding internal experts was often difficult. Wipro used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to enhance an existing people-finding tool with enriched metadata and better search. Wipro employees can now find experts to help resolve problems faster. It took just two months to create the solution using built-in SharePoint Server capabilities—half the time of other methods.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published May 2010
Business Needs
Headquartered in Bangalore, India, Wipro Technologies is one of India’s premier IT companies, with revenues of U.S.$5 billion and a client base of Fortune 1000 and Global 500 companies. Wipro has more than 100,000 employees working in 54 development centers across India, Europe, and the United States, and 30 business offices around the world.
In 2001, Wipro created an internal knowledge management portal called KNet, which was based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2001. Over time, Wipro created several Web applications on KNet to meet the knowledge management needs of different groups. One of the most popular was Konnect, a people-finding tool that employees used to locate peers with specific expertise. Employees would select a topic from a predefined list, and Konnect provided a list of experts from which they could choose to send a question.
“Konnect was useful to some degree, but you had to know which expert to send your question to,”says Shrinidhi Nadumane, a Knowledge Management Group Manager at Wipro. “Konnect was designed to serve a much smaller organization; as Wipro grew, the list of experts returned became overwhelming.”
Also, newer Wipro employees were used to social sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and wanted to see more modern features in Konnect. Wikis, blogs, and online communities had begun to appear at Wipro, but they had no links to Konnect. “Our vision was to integrate all our social media applications to give employees flexible, accurate access to one another,” adds Nadumane.
Solution
Wipro decided to join the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) in January 2010 and revamp Konnect to take advantage of the enhanced social networking capabilities in the product.
“The whole idea was to leverage the out-of-the-box capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010 rather than build them in code,” says Sunil Kanoor, another Knowledge Management Group Manager at Wipro. A team of two developers and a Microsoft consultant worked for two months to migrate Konnect to SharePoint Server 2010. They used Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 to customize SharePoint Web parts needed for data aggregation and to transfer existing metadata tags. They also added additional metadata to queries and people profiles to enhance the accuracy of matches, and they outfitted Konnect with the improved search capability in SharePoint Server.
Using SharePoint Server My Sites, Wipro created individual profile pages for a test group of Wipro employees. These pages contain detailed information about the individuals’ areas of expertise and links to their blogs. To locate colleagues, employees select atopic category and submit aquestion. Konnect examines the category and posts the question to all the experts attached to that category. If no experts are returned, Konnect broadcasts the query to the appropriate groups, inviting people to extend help.
“People can contribute keywords to their profiles, which makes searches more relevant,” Kanoor says. “We also use SharePoint activity feeds to track individual users and their contributions. If someone posts a query, changes their profile, or posts a discussion feed, Konnect will notify employees that have requested notification. This gives employees the ability to track what others are saying and doing.”
Benefits
By using the new Konnect, Wipro employees can find internal experts that can help resolve problems faster, whichhelps Wipro to deliver better solutions to customers sooner. By revamping the application with SharePoint Server 2010 rather than creating a new application from scratch, Wipro cut its development costs in half.
Better People Search for Better Solutions
Wipro employees can now find experts quickly and easily across the company’s large employee base. “With richer metadata and improved search, Konnect is helping like-minded employees find each other,” saysVed Prakash, Chief Knowledge Officer for Wipro Technologies. “For example, if you have a document that you want your peers to review, you can quickly find people to contribute, which enriches our work for customers. Konnect provides instant access to experts for all our employees, thereby ensuring faster resolution and better solutions for customers. Konnect helps us start discussions and connect people so that they can raise new questions and enrich our solutions.”
Development Time Halved
Compared to developing a new version of Konnect from scratch, enhancing it by using SharePoint Server cut the company’s development time in half. “SharePoint Server includes managed metadata and other features that simplified our work,” Kanoor says. “We were able to complete the project in two months versus the four to five months it would have taken just to develop the social computing portion.”
Adds Krishna Kumari M, General Manager of Information Systems at Wipro, “The development time was greatly reduced by the fact that SharePoint Server 2010 provides many features out of the box. This enabled us to provide almost all of the desired functionality at rollout—a dream come true for every IT group.”
Wipro has plenty of enhancements planned for Konnect, including creating customized versions for different groups. “The application framework will support such variations without much customization,” Kanoor says. “SharePoint Server is a flexible yet powerful foundation that we are exploring for many of our social media and knowledge management needs.”
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published May 2010