www.hcltech.

com

WORKFORCE
PRODUCTIVITY

Collaboration,
Content &
Social

AuthOr:
Arabinda Nag Chowdhury
(a.k.a. ’Auro’)

WHITEPAPER September 2015

WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY | September 2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE CONTEXT 3

WORKFORCE DEMOGRAPHICS AND CULTURE 3

IT INNOVATIONS 3

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR CORPORATE IT 3

OUR PRODUCTIVITY THOUGHTS AND SOLUTIONS 4

OUR POINT OF VIEW 4

OUR PROPOSITION 5

PEOPLE 5

PROCESS 6

ASSETS 6

OUR OFFERINGS AND SOLUTIONS 7

OUR OFFERINGS 8

OUR SOLUTIONS 8

A CASE STUDY 9

THE CUSTOMER 9

THE BUSINESS PROBLEM 9

OUR SOLUTION 9

SUMMARY – LET US GET REAL! 10

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WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY | September 2015

THE CONTEXT
Business is undergoing change at a breakneck speed. This is not only from a business
model perspective where digital ways of working are making the middle man and the
cumbersome processes redundant, but also from a technology perspective. The Chief
Strategist and Architect of Intel, Jim Henrys, recently commented that “we’re in a
period of intense change” in the business context. We would not have any challenges
appreciating the ‘change’ part of the statement, but let us dive deep into the why
‘intense’ part.

WORKFORCE DEMOGRAPHICS AND CULTURE

Currently, Millennials comprise 30% of our workforce, and in the next decade
this number would shoot up to 75% (based on a recent Deloitte study). 30% of
the workforce in the developed nations are already freelancers and a recent study by
Millennial Branding has discovered that only 7% of the Millennials work for Fortune
500 companies since startups are dominating the workforce for this demographic in
this economy. In terms of ways of working, physical presence in offices is increasingly
becoming irrelevant. Over 300 contributors of WordPress, powered by Automattic, all
work in a globally distributed manner from home all over the world, and no one uses
e-mail. Autocracy and Command structures have made way for Holacracy.

IT INNOVATIONS
With “coordination cost falling through the floor”, as Clay Shirky would put it, we
are witnessing significant innovation in the hardware and networking world too. If
Dell’s UC Command Suite 8.1 (UCCS) is a good cross-platform analytics solution
on workforce productivity metrics, HP’s ’retail jacket‘ for its Windows tablets, Intel’s
use of WiGig wireless standard, and Fujitsu’s all-in-ones, along with touch-screen
technology, are prominent examples from the non-software world.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR CORPORATE IT

What this means for IT is a complete shift from the organization-driven software
and hardware procurement decisions to an employee-driven one. Add to this zeitgeist
the overall failure of BYOD, giving way to new mobility governance models such
as BYOA (Bring Your Own App) or CYOD (Choose Your Own Device) or COBO
(Company-owned; Business Only) or COPE (Company-Issued; Personally-enabled),
and IOT to brew a perfect storm. So much so, that ‘disrupt to be disruptive’ is the
latest mantra that IT will need to deal with.

With the ‘intensity’ of change clarified above, let us move on to how this has influenced
our point of view on digital disruptors and shaped our workforce management
solutions and services for our enterprise customers. Please note that this whitepaper
focusses on the software aspects of productivity only. 

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WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY | September 2015

OUR PRODUCTIVITY THOUGHTS AND SOLUTIONS

Attracting the best talent in the industry, knowing them beyond their profile
information, engaging and empowering them through analysis of their behavioral
traits, and creating a proper internal communication strategy would obviously mean
increased productivity. These are the key drivers of Workforce Productivity metrics in
most organizations. A recent study corroborates this, as shown below:

Biggest Drivers Behind Digital Transformation

22% Attracting Best Talents & Better

28%
engaged employees

Reporting faster to Changing Needs

23% Optimizing Business Process

27%
Increase Revenue and Profits

Benefits of Going Digital

9%
Enhanced Worker Productivity & improved
Internal Communication
9% 28%
Improved Customer Experience

Enhance existing Products and Services

10%
Develop New Business Models

Automated Operation Processes

12%
19% Expanded Reach to New Markets

13%
Launch New Products and Services

Source: Raconteur (sponsored by Google), September, 2014

OUR POINT OF VIEW

With the drivers and benefits in mind, large enterprises would need to strike a
balance, in their SMACT (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Things1) journey,
and between what exists and what could be. What this means for IT is that while
on the infrastructure front, security and governance would need to be thoroughly
revamped, on the software side, they would need to retain and leverage their already

1
from Industrial Internet of Things

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WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY | September 2015

matured back-end systems or attempt to move some of those to the cloud. There will
be a need to make mandatory changes to the middle-tier applications through what is
popularly called ‘API-fication’ and plan for transformational changes to the front-office
experience. Experience, indeed, is everything! This could be brought about by looking
out for or creating device-agnostic, cloud-enabled, easy-to-use apps that are narrow
and fragmented, albeit deep and connected through the middle-tier. This trend has
come to be known as ‘APP-ification’. Jive calls these ‘Work-style tools’ and Microsoft
calls them ‘Productivity apps’. Consumerism is set to drive IT for some time to come.

As the consumer-centric juggernaut rolls on, the influence of GAFA (Google-

Amazon-Facebook-Apple) is palpable in the enterprises. If Google has influenced
small-and-medium sized businesses into thinking about alternative ways of workplace
productivity – a traditional Microsoft bastion, Amazon has taught enterprises about
contextual experience, involving preferences, behaviors and recommendations on
connected topics. While Facebook has changed the way digital avatars interact in a
virtually social world, Apple has made a huge statement with it overall ‘experience’
covering hardware and interconnected software apps.

OUR PROPOSITION
We at HCL believe that workforce productivity metrics operate at three levels, namely,
people, process, and assets, and unless technology brings these three together to make
them work in tandem, things would fall through the cracks.

People

There are two people aspects that organizations will need to address – employees and
business partners. Not only is the barrier between the personal and the professional
lives of employees getting shattered, the avenues through which employees and business
partners could add value to an organization are also getting blurred. This has been
explained briefly in the Process section below along with the concept of Communities.

Employees: Most enterprises have traditionally known its employees through static
ERP and LDAP systems that change very rarely. Called ‘systems of record’, these back-
end applications, while being the backbone, do not offer any insight into the evolving
behavioral patterns or preferences or interests of the employees that may be captured
by the “systems of engagement”. Hence the need to introduce technologies that can
capture the dynamic nature of employee-system interactions. Employee productivity
could be increased through introducing engagement tools around ’Gamification’.

Business Partners: In most cases, enterprises have an LDAP entry for an external
party participating in a business process. This is the extent of knowledge that has
been traditionally captured. However, going forward this will not work. Each external
participant will need to be known better as a human being, by way of capturing details
from unstructured collaboration and social apps, both internal and external. Effects
of consumer world (B2C) have started to have a direct bearing on the B2B and the
B2E. More so, since the B2B model is increasingly breaking down to B2B2C models.

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WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY | September 2015

Process

Processes have not kept pace at which business happens today, in terms of ensuring
optimal productivity. While this might not have an impact on back-end systems, this
has some bearing on the middle-office apps – the orchestration layer, as it were – and
front-office apps – the experience on offer. These would need to be relooked at and
revamped. Some insights and examples are given below:

Internal workforce: Traditionally, feedback loops for employees have been extremely
slow, once, or at best, twice a year. In an age where business is moving at a supersonic
pace, these processes indeed look out of place, even as organizations are trying to
address this issue. Accenture has recently done away with annual appraisals. GE has
introduced PD@GE App for real-time feedback exchange between managers and
employees, displacing the age-old process of annual appraisals. The same applies to
other business processes, wherein the employees participate. Increasing reusability,
through predefined templates, refined by experience, seems to be one of the key
employee productivity enablers.

External parties: Similarly, organizations lack inclusive processes and policies that could
instill more trust and transparency between the internal and external stakeholders. For
instance, in the B2B world, demand and supply processes are increasingly getting more
interactive wherein the distributors or subsidiaries project their demand, and suppliers
and vendors indicate supplies on a common software platform. To draw a parallel
from the B2C world, namely the food industry, it is quite common for consumers to
indicate specifications of a product (e.g. Ben and Jerry’s “IdeaConnection”, Dunkin
Donut’s “Create your own Donuts”, Coke’s “Flavor Creator”, and many more). We
are witnessing this pattern enforce itself on the B2B world too.

Communities: This is what brings the internal and external stakeholders together to
transform processes, and increase sense of belongingness and ownership amongst the
participants. In today’s world, as Microsoft puts it, we need to “work like a network”,
something that shows in Microsoft’s Office Delve offering, powered by Office graph.
In generic terms, “Communities” are primarily of three types -- of Interest, of Purpose,
and of Practice2.

Assets

Like it or not, high employee turnover is not showing any signs of abatement. So,
organizations need to be even more prepared to ensure that organization memory
is strengthened and people dependence is reduced while increasing community
experience around blogs, Wikis, forums, surveys, polls, quizzes, and consensus-driven
tools. Unless organizations create solid strategies on managing organization knowledge
assets created by focused community groups and mapped to capability models that
capture flow of information, it would be well-nigh impossible to ensure productivity.
Traditionally, enterprises have not done a great job in managing the metadata
(“know-who” and “know-how”) around these assets. Taxonomy and asset life cycle
management is another area that organizations would need to pay more attention to.

2
COI (Interest): Driven by feeling of attachment to a particular area; COP1 (Purpose): Short-term, around solving a specific problem or
function; COP2 (Practice): Long-term, around a functional or technical domain

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WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY | September 2015

This is more pertinent now since these knowledge assets are not only documents or
spreadsheets anymore. The types of content to be managed by enterprises are ever-
increasing. Here are some examples:

yy YouTube or Moxtra clip

yy SoundCloud snippet
yy “Storm” from Stormboard
yy Bitrix web-it sticky note
yy Google Hangout recording
yy Asana Task
yy Jira project plan
yy Survey Monkey surveys
yy Twiddla whiteboard
yy Yammer feed
yy Microsoft Sway report or deck
A quick look at the offerings reveals
how IT is getting increasingly Social,
High
consumerized. Assets could be Immersive &
Contextual
anything in digital shape or Deep, Yet
form. Increasingly, specialized Simple!!!
Effectiveness

services are being offered by niche

product vendors to ensure that the
workforce gets close-to-consumer-
world experience. The depiction on
the right, gives us an indication of Controlled Collaborative
Low
how the increase in belongingness
and a contextual experience can
result in enhanced effectiveness and
Belongingness
productivity, in a digital program. Low High

OUR OFFERINGS AND SOLUTIONS

Our offerings and some of our solutions are indicated below. Our solutions are created
on a construct called KE4 (Know, Enable, Engage, Excite, and Empower). In short, we
offer technology-unaware “experiences” as services (e.g. REST APIs or web services) to
our customer – these “experiences” could be engendered through creation of a context
for personalized delivery of content, enabling ease of use, opening up of multiple
media for collaboration, allowing device-agnosticism as allowed by IT policies, social
platforms or lightweight enterprise portals. This whitepaper will not provide a detailed
description of how our solutions are mapped to this construct but will provide a sneak
peek into our evolving solution repository.

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WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY | September 2015

OUR OFFERINGS
yy Assessment of IT landscape towards attaining optimal digital experience for
employees and business partners
yy Building a strong business case for Workforce Productivity programs
yy Complete digitalization (API-fication, APP-ification) of your application portfolio
at scale
yy Enabling the workforce with Personalized Business Applications
yy Establishing COE and Governance around the proposition
yy Creating a roadmap for Workforce, Enablement, Engagement, Excitement, and
Empowerment
yy Migration of Legacy Applications to engaging platforms of choice
yy Implementation of differentiated capabilities on Knowledge Management,
leveraging next-generation digital, social, mobility, and analytics technologies

OUR SOLUTIONS
yy Enterprise-wide Portal Framework for creation of light-weight portals
yy Digital Governance Framework
yy Content Aggregation and Syndication
yy Legacy Application Migration Framework (e.g. Lotus Notes to SharePoint)
yy Mobile Experience APIs
yy Context-aware Personalization
yy Audio-based Tacit Knowledge Codifier
yy Search services on multiple media
yy Audio-enabled
yy Scribble-driven
yy Push-oriented cognitive intelligence based on usage patterns
yy Usage Analytics to find adoption gaps
yy Voice-based Collaboration
yy End-to-end Knowledge Exchange Framework along with readymade Community
Templates
yy Visualization-based Analytics
yy Point Solutions such as Consensus-based Decision Enabler and Enterprise
Influencer Index
yy Multi-device authoring Surveillance Enablers around Adoption and Security 

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WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY | September 2015
Solution Highlights
yy Enhanced visibility of
demand and supply
for the workforce –
Replenishment data, stock-
outs, and sales loss. Missed
and on-time deliveries, and
waste control
yy Consumer behavior –
Insight into customers
through social channels
yy Managing promotions
and surveys – Gave
better understanding of
distributor and bottler
expectations
yy Predictive analytics –
Mining of massive database
of historical point-of-sale
and promotions data,
integrated with real-time
data from social media and
weather forecasts
yy Enabling launch strategy
– Online training and
videos, Demand and
Spend Management, and
Performance Measurements
and Branding
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A CASE STUDY
Any digital initiative is a journey. Nothing could
substantiate this better than HCL’s long-term
relationship with this customer. A journey that has
witnessed transformation right from the initial days
of optimizing internal portals, through integrating
numerous data sources, and finally surfacing
applications of mobile devices, not only for the
employees but also for their business partners.
THE CUSTOMER
A leading producer of flavored beverages in North
America and The Caribbean. Through years of
acquisitions and mergers, not to mention in-house
innovations, they have developed a diverse, flavorful
brand portfolio, and an integrated business model
that uniquely positions them in this industry today.
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
The issue faced by the business was primarily one
of poor view of sales data, including modules on
Bottlers’ Licensing, Asset Management in stores,
Surveys, Promotions, Route-to-Market, ePOS
sales, and so on. There were too many sources of
truth, none of which seemed to be sacrosanct and
easy to access or use.
OUR SOLUTION
HCL solved this business problem through creation
of a data mart that became the single source of
truth for all sales-related information. This data
mart gets its data after proper massaging through
an ETL (Informatica) that pulls data from multiple
back-end systems such as SAP ECC, Siebel CRM,
Oracle Hyperion, etc. Data was surfaced on both
internal and external facing websites and mobile
apps.
9
WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY | September 2015
SUMMARY – LET US GET REAL!
R elate
Establishing relationship beyond
static systems is key to ensure
productivity. This could be
achieved by Social Apps.
E nable
Enablement will ensure
engagement, empowering the
workforce through easy-to-use
and effective apps. So, take care
of it.
A lign
To align workforce management
solutions to the business-critical
tasks that the employees perform
is a sine qua non. Do not trip on
it.
L ose weight
Whether a mobile app or a web
portal, it has to be light-weight
today. Heavy-height monolithic
portals and sites are a passé. Let
us bid them a good-bye.
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R elationship: The two key values of HCL as an
organization - Employees First and Relationship
beyond the Contract- are around relationship.
Our thought process around ‘workforce
productivity’ also has this tenet at its core.
Unless we are able to relate to a person and know
about him or her, beyond system parameters, we
would not be able to take our customers beyond
the traditional ways of working.
E nabling the Workforce: Once a person, be
it an employee or a business partner, is known,
it is time to enable them through easy-to-use
apps that can engage them. It is only through
engagement that excitement or empowerment of
participants could be affected. This is necessary
in Holacracy.
A lignment to the right processes: Unless a
digitalization initiative helps easing out everyday
tasks of the workforce, it will not fly. Hence, it
is imperative to identify key processes that affect
business returns and work on a better experience
aligned to such processes.
L ight-weight & Nimble Software: Agility,
in software ideation, development and roll-
out, affecting changes to the current software
repository, is a key to success of any productivity
journey. This means that the applications need
to get narrow, if fragmented, to allow quick
updates to be released and course corrections to
be made.
10
 ABOUT HCL

About HCL Technologies

HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company working with clients in the
areas that impact and redefine the core of their businesses. Since its emergence on the
global landscape, and after its IPO in 1999, HCL has focused on ‘transformational
outsourcing’, underlined by innovation and value creation, offering an integrated
portfolio of services including software-led IT solutions, remote infrastructure
management, engineering and R&D services and business services. HCL leverages
its extensive global offshore infrastructure and network of offices in 31 countries to
provide holistic, multi-service delivery in key industry verticals including Financial
Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare &
Life sciences. HCL takes pride in its philosophy of ‘Employees First,
Customers Second’ which empowers its 106,107 transformers to create real value for
customers. HCL Technologies, along with its subsidiaries, had consolidated revenues
of US$ 6 billion, for the Financial Year ended as on 30th June 2015 (on LTM basis).
For more information, please visit www.hcltech.com

About HCL Enterprise

HCL is a $6.9 billion leading global technology and IT enterprise comprising two
companies listed in India – HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems. Founded
in 1976, HCL is one of India’s original IT garage start-ups. A pioneer of modern
computing, HCL is a global transformational enterprise today. Its range of offerings
includes product engineering, custom & package applications, BPO, IT infrastructure
services, IT hardware, systems integration, and distribution of information and
communications technology (ICT) products across a wide range of focused industry
verticals. The HCL team consists of over 110,000 professionals of diverse nationalities,
who operate from 31 countries including over 505 points of presence in India. HCL
has partnerships with several leading global 1000 firms, including leading IT and
technology firms. For more information, please visit www.hcl.com

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