How Indonesia’s Second Largest Telecom Operator built a social fabric for its Employees
The Goal
Build an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) which would become a platform for:
- Information sharing channel
- A conversation medium for context and relationship building
- Finding expertise and solving problems
- Crowdsourcing ideas
- Driving engagement
- Omnichannel
Background
The field of knowledge management has historically taken an artefactual and asset-oriented view of knowledge. Accordingly, early knowledge management systems aimed to codify knowledge and make it independent from the individual knowledge bearer into systems that have been characterised as “people-to-document knowledge management systems”. However, after years of pushing such systems into organisations, the approach has proven largely ineffective.
Effective communication and knowledge work requires people to develop a shared background, a phenomenon that has previously been described as common ground, mutual knowledge, or cognitive social capital or simply a shared background in practice. Through discussions and sharing updates, people get to know each other, learn what is important in the organisation, how others interpret and talk about matters of interest. What emerges is the shared background that makes the world intelligible in similar ways, and that is the foundation for all other knowledge work to happen. In overly rationalistic accounts of organisational work, this highly valuable exercise might be easily overlooked, as it might be seen not to serve an immediately work-related purpose. However, the emergent nature of a shared background in communicative practice is the glue that makes possible all other knowledge work.
The Solution
We needed to build an alternative to the fragmented external groups of communication which have emerged to meet the social needs of the employees.
The role of TechnoIdentity was to conduct the conception and building of the application from scratch. We defined the needs and established detailed specifications and mockups that were used as a roadmap during development through consulting with the client.
We opted for a microservice architecture for this product, i.e. we built several independent and loosely coupled services, each with a specific goal. We used Clojure on the backend and React on the frontend. Responsive mobile application, which can support several screen sizes, including tablets, was built with Kotlin (Android) and Swift (iOS).
Impact
Highly scalable platform, delivered into production in 8 months, on time and on budget. An omnichannel social intranet with analytics was available to meet the objectives of the organisation. This activity was identified to improve the eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) by 20%.