CIO Straight Talk - Issue 7 - 31

31

We've created the world's
largest organization of ideapreneurs,

A WORKFORCE ON THE GO

with a culture of ideapreneurship

If the goal of a program like EDNA is to foster grass-

that to date has spawned thousands

roots problem solving and innovation, our mobility-first

of ideas generating hundreds of

so that they have the bandwidth to engage in problem

millions of dollars in value to
HCL's clients.

initiatives are designed to make employees more efficient
solving and innovation.
Several years ago, we decided to make mobile devices
the primary distribution channel for the applications our
employees use day in and day out. That strategy has not

happening on the ground and that helps them to expand
their own knowledge base. Once they realized this,
we overcame any potential inertia. We also made sure
that participation was not an extra tax imposed on our
knowledge workers. EDNA is entirely opt-in. It asks if an
expert is available to answer, and that person always has
the option to say no. It's collaboration by choice.
Today, we have more than 10,000 employees on the
platform, from front-line to management level. And
what started out as a real-time technical forum is now a
place employees go to ask questions about all aspects

only improved the reach of those applications, it has also
increased adoption. The primary driver, though, was the
goal of unlocking productivity and increasing business
agility and the speed of decision making.
We've developed a host of mobile decision support,
operational, and transactional tools. The 20-plus mobile
applications available in our Go-Mobile! store allows
employees to approve or submit business requests,
enter timesheets showing the time spent on particular
projects, request taxis, make travel arrangements,
apply for time off, contact tech support, join conference

of their work life, including training, onboarding, career
planning, and compensation. When we roll out a new
enterprise system, EDNA is now a channel of choice
when employees get stuck. It's crowd-sourced problem
resolution and innovation, and it offers the benefits of
crowdsourcing without the fear of important intellectual
property leaving the company.
EDNA not only enables more efficient problem
solving by enabling synchronous communication and
collaboration. The same time-different place interactions
also help foster a sense of community in a way that an
asynchronous "management forum" system - in which

What started out

you get a response from someone in the organization

as a real-time technical

hours or days after you pose a question - does not.

forum is now a place

This growing community of over 10,000 willing experts

employees go to ask

is a live demonstration of HCL's ability to leverage its
knowledge and altruistic capital. In a distributed global

questions about all aspects

enterprise like ours, workforce collaboration is the engine

of their work life, including

that fuels our growth, and we need a boundary-less

training, onboarding,

organization to make that happen.

career planning, and

The number of things connected to the
Internet exceeds the number of people on
Earth, according to Cisco.

2008

2008

compensation.

Google's index of the web consists
of 1 trillion unique URLs.
CIO Straight Talk - Issue 7

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CIO Straight Talk - Issue 7
