Seven interesting deployments of Enterprise Social Networks by Indian enterprises

Considering the networking and connectivity benefits of social media platforms, businesses are increasingly replicating the same model within the organization by implementing Enterprise Social Network (ESN) to enhance collaboration among co-workers across various geographies and time zones. Businesses are also integrating key enterprise-specific features like emails, discussions/ forums across domains, knowledge repository, etc, in an ESN to enable seamless exchange of ideas and information.

Dataquest takes a look at 7 such companies that have successfully implemented an ESN within their organization to increase employee productivity and ensure greater collaboration and transparency.

HDFC Life 'My Life'

Inspired by the social networking platforms, HDFC Life deployed a social networking application 'My Life'. To encourage employees to use the social network, extensive communication was done through teasers emails and SMSes. In a 5 months’ time, as much as 7,000 employees logged in and started using the network for discussions, idea sharing, and for connecting with colleagues and seniors across locations.

Today, there are more than 400 communities related to departmental initiatives, innovations, and common interest areas. These communities help in creating a knowledge bank of all discussions and documents, educate employees in tax planning, selling better, clearing CFA exams, and sharing regional practices with everyone across the country. The platform is being used to share important 'how to documents' for everyday tasks like using e-learning platform, lead management system, claim reimbursement, etc. Live chats to connect with all India employees are regularly conducted.

Polaris Financial Technology 'Project Octopus'

Polaris Financial Technology is a provider of financial technology for banking, insurance, and other financial services. The firm was facing issues with too many silos within and across teams. A lot of time was taken up by calls and emails.

Aimed to address these pain points, Polaris embarked on a project ‘Octopus’ as a central enterprise platform which allows centralization of team correspondence, managing and tracking of teams, analytics, knowledge repository, etc, from a single space. It also allows private conversations with teams or individuals.

All this resulted in more transparency in decision making as decisions made are visible to all room members. Moreover, there has been 25% reduction in emails while the email's volume has come down to 70% and is sent now only while interacting with clients. 99.5% mailing groups have been removed and there is 75% reduction in ramp-up time for new joiners in the projects. This has also resulted in a huge impact on employees' productivity, which has increased by 12%.

Essar's ‘MyEssar’

Essar was traditionally using a platform that provided only one-way communication with no means of a collaborative and interactive approach. And to sustain the existing platform and to broadcast information across Essar locations, major replication was needed, which led to people dependencies and duplication of effort.

To address these concerns, the company built an intranet portal 'MyEssar' to create a digital platform that is more user friendly and allowed young Essarites to consume information and interact with other counterparts and business with ease.

The impact of the project has been significant in several ways, including business HR, where some crucial decisions have been made because of the new platform. Now, the users are engaging via this platform to provide a solution for internal job postings, employee surveys, quick polls, announcements, live streaming of videos, sharing of pictures from office events and much more. All this has led to a new way of thinking. The employees are now coming up with engaging and more creative ways of communicating with end users.

L&T Infotech

To get the right information at the right time, L&T Infotech began to develop its enterprise social networking solution CliquePoint.

CliquePoint has a 'personal collaboration' feature which provides people with comprehensive tools such as micro-blogs, blogs, and wikis, enabling them to connect and follow others, and also help them track relevant business events.

Employees can subscribe and follow important events from their line of business (LOB) systems and collaborate over CliquePoint. Employees also have the ability to create a venture, which is a closed transient community for collaboration.

With this, employees are not only accessing relevant information but also find relevant people and make connections. With more and more employees accessing the solution, the usage of email has reduced by 50% while user productivity has improved by 20%. Time for query resolution, reviews, planning and requirement management has reduced significantly leading to overall reduction in time to market in the range of 10-15%.

DDB Mudra

Inspired by the popularity of social media platforms, DDB Mudra, one of the world’s largest advertising holding companies, wanted to provide a Facebook like user experience for employees to improve collaboration. The company wanted the ideas to be captured, collaborated, and stored in a central repository. It also wanted to empower its employees with information, anywhere, anytime, and on multiple devices such as smartphones/tabs, etc, as is the norm these days.

The collaboration platform deployed was built around the MangoApps architecture that uses open source technologies based on Java. The user experience is similar to Facebook and allows users to create new ideas and share it across groups. These can be collaborated through multi-threaded posts/discussions and refined. All these are stored in a central repository thus, ensuring nothing gets lost and ideas can be easily searched and revisited. With this, there has been a 16% decrease in travel and communication costs along with the ease in finding information and access to resources/people. The number of ideas contributed by employees also doubled and the productivity of the employees also increased substantially.

Encore Capital Group

A debt management and recovery solutions firm Encore Capital Group wanted a conventional intranet site which could be accessed anywhere, anytime. A common internal resource for employees where all the information scattered among multiple IT products’ chat and group discussion platforms can be aggregated.

The company used SocialXtend, an enterprise social collaboration tool leveraging SharePoint 2010 infrastructure, to integrate all the existing sites and sub-sites and give Encore’s 4,000 employees a common platform to have conversations, blogs, share ideas, etc. With this ESN, employees can team up in workspaces based on their interests, projects, expertise, corporate initiatives, and so on.

As a result, there has been a tremendous increase in employee engagement and over 2,500 active users collaborate from various offices. Because of this active collaboration, it was easy to identify the users as experts, problem solvers, thought leaders, etc. Further, it enables Encore to take timely decisions and measures to maintain the health of the social network within the organization. The company also experienced more efficient file sharing and document management, which has in turn reduced multiple emails.

Mindlance

Mindlance, a global business and information technology consulting firm, needed a social collaboration tool to enable its global staff to stay connected. The company also wanted to reduce the operational cost for inter-branch calls, or calls from branch to executives out on the field or even on roaming, as well as the operational cost for conferencing between employees, no matter where each one is placed.

With a social collaboration system, the opex cost decreased by 34% whereas scalability increased by 400%. The employee productivity increased by 28% and the overall revenue increased by 25%.