Reengineering and reinvention are the drivers of business relevance and growth in today’s context of ever-changing customer needs. Organizations need to be agile and responsive when it comes to meeting customer demands. In this context, Wipro is well positioned as a partner and co-innovator for its clients in their transformation journey and facilitate their foray into new sectors and markets. However, to differentiate itself and stay ahead of its competition, Wipro has sought to demonstrate superior growth through high productivity. The aim has been to quickly solve clients’ business problems using deep domain knowledge and expertise in bleeding edge technologies.

Connecting, collaborating and interacting

With its huge employee base, the struggle for Wipro has been to put a mechanism in place which allows employees to seamlessly collaborate, connect and interact to tap their full potential. In absence of such a mechanism the business metric that suffers most is the organization’s profitable growth. The core focus for Wipro was organizational productivity improvement by capturing transformational deals, for which the company was looking to establish a collaboration platform. If a collaboration platform was not established at the earliest, the company was likely to see delay in formulation of solutions leading to customer dissatisfaction. Further, in absence of a seamless platform for collaborating, learning, sharing and solving, the individuals/teams were also likely to lose motivation.

Strategic development of enterprise social platform

Wipro initially kick started the project ‘My Organization World’ for which an enterprise social platform was built in-house. Since it was time-intensive affair to build a rich set of features, the platform was not mature enough; hence it was not very stable. Therefore, various chat sessions with senior leaders were held, after which the CIO team, HR and L&D team jointly decided to adapt a well-established tool like Yammer as an enterprise social platform which is accessible from all devices. The goal was to enable employees to participate in real time discussions, share their thoughts and opinions, find answers to their questions, offer help to others and stay connected. The social learning and collaboration initiative was built around a mature and stable platform which emerged as the biggest advantage to the company. The benefits were augmented by the fact that the company received high focus and support from its solution partner. The adopted social enterprise platform promoted and facilitated social learning and collaboration opportunities through an enterprise wide standard platform. It also handled large multimedia contents in a structured framework.

Through the adoption of a mature enterprise social platform, Wipro now hopes to achieve greater transparency though real time collaboration. The platform can emerge as a great tool that is capable of tapping into the collective wisdom of the vast employee base and increased employee productivity. It can also be used to gain visibility into various teams working across the globe which can help in making faster and better decisions. The social platform can also connect the company’s remote and mobile workforce. Cross-pollination and exchange of ideas on the platform can result in better innovation. Other benefits that can emerge through the use of the platform are cultural integration, efficient channel of communication, better and simplified project and change management. These benefits can further result in improvement of the onboarding experience and can lead to higher engagement and retention.

Capturing learning from the initiative

In an aim to capture the learnings from enterprise social platform adoption, Wipro has formulated provision for documentation of strategy right from its initial stage of design to the final implementation stage. Case studies, use cases, white paper, documentation of content from internal forums, Tweet chat sessions, paper submissions etc. are all part of Wipro’s effort to ensure that learning from the initiative can be used for on-going and future reference.