How do you take advantage of the features that are exhibited by social mediums such as Facebook and Twitter, without compromising security? How do you ensure collaboration across multiple geographies and time zones effortlessly? How do you ensure near real-time sharing of information to improve business agility?

L&T Infotech, a fast growing IT firm headquartered in Mumbai, was looking to explore solutions to these challenges by leveraging social techniques. The firm saw the convergence of communication and collaboration as a major factor influencing the way businesses are run, and wanted to innovate in the business of providing value to its clients.

After conducting extensive research within and outside the company, the firm decided to build an internal social network that mirrored the user friendliness and interfaces of popular social networking tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn. “We realized that if we provided the right information at the right time and in the right context, we could transform the business,” says Ashish Varerkar, Alliance Manager & Head of Microsoft Practice, L&T Infotech.

With this goal in mind, L&T Infotech began to develop its enterprise social networking solution, which it named CliquePoint. Built using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as the foundation, the solution was designed to connect easily to its existing IT environment. From concept to implementation, the solution was developed in four months.

Leveraging the power of communities

Understanding the power of communities in the success of a social networking solution, the social networking solution has a ‘communities’ feature, where people with common interests can exchange ideas and best practices while following the activities of the community. CliquePoint also 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, more importantly, help in tracking relevant business events.

But the most interesting feature that is adapted from social networking websites such as Twitter is the ability to follow important 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.

Building a social culture

Today, the enterprise social networking solution provides access to important business events, people profiles, and communities for collaboration and content sharing, and is quickly building a social culture within L&T Infotech. The social enterprise solution averages about 2,000+ visitors daily, has more than 200 blogs, more than 60 wikis, 20 communities, more than 3,000+ documents, and more than 80 ventures.

Time for query resolution, planning and requirement management has reduced significantly, leading to 10-15 percent reduction in the time to market

Ashish Varerkar, Alliance Manager & Head - Microsoft Practice, L&T Infotech

The solution has not only helped employees in accessing relevant information, but also in finding relevant people and making connections. With more and more employees accessing the solution, the usage of e-mail has been reduced significantly as relevant information is available on a personal or community wall. Instead of employees searching for information, today relevant information reaches employees due to the ability to follow business events or people. As a result, e-mail usage has been reduced by a factor of 50 percent, while user productivity has improved significantly by a factor of 20 percent.