This article is about the evolution of our enterprise portal from a non-descript amalgamation of links to a tightly integrated, role-based platform for employee self-service and information
My first introduction to the employee portal happened quite customarily within the first one hour of joining Wipro. It was pretty much a nondescript portal with the primary function of being a gateway to different applications. A supposed value add was a small space dedicated to company news and announcements, however the freshness of the content there could be questioned. My first couple of weeks went in navigating my way through the labyrinth of applications and figuring out “where to find what!”. There were tons of applications, and quite naturally, there were too many duplications. Even for common transactions like time management, one had to hop to five different applications - leave, attendance, timesheets, overtime management, shift management! Each app had its own workflow, its own design language and its own mind! Manual interventions seemed to be the norm. Mobile apps were a distant dream and user centric design was an unknown entity. Well…that was year 2007.
Fast forward to 2016, the year we started the digital transformation journey at Wipro. One of our main focus areas was to transform the internal application landscape to provide a great digital experience to our employees through re- imagined processes, simplified workflows and systems, enhanced automation and innovation. The other benefits of this transformation would be opening up of new revenue generation streams, enhancing productivity and making us more agile and cost effective.
We unanimously decided that the first milestone of this app transformation journey should be our employee portalmyWipro. In the process, we would also transform the various monolithic legacy enterprise applications into fully renovated, agile ones, which would be simple, light and mobile enabled.
A consolidated platform for employee self-service and business transactions, designed and conceived with user centric principles, the portal would be completely personalized to various user groups, ensuring that they are able to do all the relevant transactions, get updated on important org announcements, view the relevant metrics, all from one place. The basic tenets of the experience we wanted to weave were Connectedness, Decision on the go, Ability to transact anywhere, anytime, any device and Collaboration.
So, many workshops and sessions later, we could define our user groups, filter them further into meaningful personas and journey maps; empathize with them to understand their pain points and aspirations and finally arrive at the design road map. We adopted various new age technology solutions like cloud, mobile, Artificial Intelligence, unified collaboration, real time and predictive analytics to create this future ready platform.
Finally, eight months of sleepless nights later, we could present the completely reimagined myWipro to the organization. Empowered by real time analytics, myWipro tightly integrates 260 mission critical enterprise apps, collaboration platform and external feeds to give a 360-degree experience to our global workforce.
The platform is role based and personalized to each user. All the users have access to a customized dashboard, which gives a quick view of all the pending approvals, tasks and updates from his/her recent transactions. It also provides users with role-based updates on various parameters like leave balance, number of hours clocked, average utilization metrics, expense reports, sales pipeline, delivery updates etc. If the user is a manager or above, it also gives him/her a detailed view of his/her team members and other important project metrics for informed decision making.
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Our approach was to eliminate duplications and redundancy and consolidate related transactions into integrated suite of apps, thereby increasing efficiency and reduce user frustration.
E.g. myTravel, which consolidated nine disparate apps into one, reduced the input fields from 76 to 5, therefore reducing the time spent on raising a request from 15 mins on an average to 2 minutes.myTime, which consolidated the multiple time management applications into a single time app, reduced the transaction time by 3X. myWorklist consolidates approval workflows from 187 applications into a single interface and infuses it with inline analytics to aid informed decision making. The open tasks and requests from across the applications are pushed to this worklist as alerts/notifications, thereby reducing transaction time and ensuring faster closureAll the apps in the platform are designed with user centric design principles and have been developed in HTML5 to ensure that they are form factor agnostic and are able to render seamlessly across all modern browsers.
This platform is hosted in cloud to ensure scalability without imposing a huge investment on storage. Real time analytics are embedded in the applications across the platform to enable better and quicker decision making. For collaboration and effective communication, we have integrated Yammer with myWipro. The platform supports a huge user base of 170K employees spread across the globe and has several spike sessions round the year when the concurrency goes to 45,000 users per session.
To support diversity, we have made all our applications in this platform accessible for the differently abled employees. The applications are all WCAG 2.0 compliant.
In short, myWipro, our digital platform for employee self-service simplifies user transactions and combines the power of enterprise data and analytics with a great user experience. It completely re imagines the way employees can be empowered to transact, learn, connect, and perform.
Business Benefits
Following are some of the business benefits that the platform has brought:
myWipro has become a brilliant example of how mobility, analytics and social together make a powerful story. This app has been developed as plug and play product and is already a source of new revenue for us.
