Over at the Deal Architect blog, Sukumar Rajgopal, CIO of Cognizant, has written a multi-part on his views on “Social Design” and its impressive implementation at the firm.
Here are some excerpts:
“We started envisioning the Meeting Concierge app to streamline the process of booking of a multi-site Tandberg meeting. It would have been quite straightforward to create a conventional app with scheduling screens to solve the problem. But that wouldn’t meet the 500% productivity gain constraint as well as the no change management constraint.
The team brainstormed a breakthrough idea – the user who is scheduling a meeting using Microsoft Outlook will continue to use the same method with a small change. The meeting organizer will add Meeting Concierge as an additional participant into the meeting. Once this is done, the Meeting Concierge uses the associate’s current location from the Global Seat Management System of Record and finds the nearest Tandberg room automatically from the conference room inventory database. And by using the Tandberg APIs, it also schedules a bridge for the duration of the meeting, automatically.
Wait, it gets better, the Meeting Concierge also automatically updates all participants’ Outlook calendars with the conference room details.
Boom. This whole process now takes a few minutes instead of the previous few hours. Massive productivity gain and delight for users was achieved.
As you can see, the Meeting Concierge is a great example of the social design techniques we use to create new kinds of apps.
With such apps, the OneCognizant platform was gathering momentum rapidly. In Feb. 2012, we hit 85% employee coverage on Oneclick tasks. Accolades started coming in.
In March 2012, OneCognizant was recognized as a “Top 5 Innovations of the Year” by the prestigious NASSCOM Innovation Awards program. We were a tad disappointed that we didn’t make the final Top 2 list.
We requested Geoffrey Moore, the innovation guru who coined the term “Systems of Engagement” to provide his impressions on OneCognizant for the CIO 100 Awards nomination. He had this to say about One Cognizant:
“What is impressive is how deeply an enterprise IT initiative has embraced the design rules of user experience design and social design. The ideas around Systems of Engagement have been circulating for some time, but few CIOs have been able to enact them, most still being held back by the pull of the past."
We are very pleased to see that OneCognizant has been chosen as a CIO 100 honoree.
On May 7, 2012, just 372 days since global availability, we hit the 5 million app launches milestone. We now have 251 Web apps in the App Store, releasing 10 new apps every month on an average. The “Like” count on the platform has reached 50,000.
Clearly, these kinds of stats, tell us that the program is headed in the right direction and has gathered significant momentum, though it is still early days.
But given that we are an organization of 140,000-plus people, these stats could be called vanity metrics (as Eric Ries calls them). We need a more direct measure of the platform’s value creation benefit. Fortunately, we were able to add a question on the OneCognizant experience in our annual internal satisfaction survey. We were very pleased when 75%-plus associates gave OneCognizant a rating of 4 or better on a scale of 5.”
Other OneCognizant applications with similar impressive payback from a Sukumar presentation.
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