With employee experience increasingly vital to business success, enterprises are rethinking how they deliver applications to business users to ensure greater productivity and efficiency. Global consulting and IT services company Infosys is one such company doing that at scale.
Rapid digital transformation at Infosys over recent years had resulted in a multitude of applications both homegrown and acquired. However, driving the adoption of these applications by its 270,000 employees had become a burdensome undertaking for the IT giant, which offers its business users access to over 200 homegrown applications alone.
Although the company had a rich bank of information to cater to almost every requirement of its employees, there was no unified channel through which to experience it. Employees had to visit each application separately — a cumbersome process that was sapping productivity.
“Infosys was struggling with many tedious and time consuming internal operational processes that were taking away precious time from employees,” says Narendra Sonawane, vice president and head of information systems at Infosys. “The internal systems and processes were not available on mobile devices, and neither were they intelligent enough to be able help employees anticipate and respond early and be more productive. For instance, a new joiner needed to access seven different web apps to become functional.”
To empower its knowledge workers with efficient access to assets they need to perform their day-to-day work, Infosys created an intelligent core platform that would in turn support several other platforms and applications.
“The company philosophically refers to this core platform as Live Enterprise, a platform with agility built into its DNA so that it can quickly sense changing business needs and continuously evolve in response,” Sonawane says. “The platform was to make Infosys a more agile organization that could respond to business needs impeccably backed by the availability of resources and knowledge workers.”
The platform has won Infosys a 2022 US CIO 100 award for IT innovation and leadership.
Intelligent automation at play
To create a platform for ensuring a unified experience across capabilities such as CRM, ERP, and custom-apps, Infosys leveraged extreme automation, taking a mobile- and cloud-first approach to ensure agility and speed at scale.
The hybrid-cloud strategy for Live Enterprise provided Infosys with the opportunity to move away from proprietary technology in favor of an open-source stack. In addition to Live Enterprise, the resulting Polycloud architecture also supports Infosys Meridian, Infosys Assessment Platform, Infosys NIA, and other key company platforms.
As part of its core, the platform leverages a knowledge graph to identify the right projects for the right talents and to recommend learning options to employees. The knowledge graph, which establishes relationships among objects, events, situations, and concepts, has more than 23 million nodes and 109 million relationships and provides employees recommendations such as adjacent skills to learn, skills popular in their unit, future skills of need, trainings to undertake, career path guidance, and best fitting projects.
In developing Live Enterprise, Infosys also used process mining across 20-plus processes to help streamline business operations. “Several tools were enabled to constantly monitor IT systems against established KPIs and identify root causes of business disruptions and eliminate them quickly,” says Sonawane.
The platform also makes extensive use of AI. For example, with Document AI and optical character recognition, key data points can be extracted from a statement of work to create a draft project plan. Also, with AI-enabled Resume Parser, the company can extract personally identifiable information (PII), skills, educational details, and professional summary from CVs. “With Resume Parser, nearly half a million resumes are parsed every month, thus helping with quick turnaround, saving about two million minutes,” says Sonawane.
A platform for platforms
Live Enterprise itself hosts a range of platforms aimed at enhancing user experience, including InfyMe, a mobile-first self-service digital platform that brings together information and transactions an employee needs together in one place, drawing from Infosys’s 450-plus applications.
Another platform, LEX, gives employees access to learning content from anywhere, from any device, at any time. It contains courses for enhancing technical and professional skills to help engineering students become industry ready.
“With collaboration platforms such as MS Teams and WebEx in place and with the availability of one-stop employee app and learning apps, collaboration, productivity and employee experience was restored and enhanced during the time of the pandemic and beyond,” says Sonawane.
Live Enterprise is equipped with a cloud proxy solution for comprehensive endpoint security. As part of that security strategy, endpoint systems have been integrated with Intune. Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager also ensures 95% auto remediation of known vulnerabilities.
The platform also integrates DevSecOps practices supported with tools such as app monitoring, resulting in significant test automation and automated code-quality analysis. Chatbots deployed across applications respond to 31,000 user queries per month, while ticket automation has expedited ticket resolution without manual intervention.
“The compounded outcome of these features was a 4X increase in automated deployments, 80% test automation, and 70% automation in code-quality analysis. These automations have led to a 50% improvement in deployment lead time, 48% defect reduction, and 15% ticket reduction due to better quality releases,” says Sonawane.
Live Enterprise also makes extensive use of robotic process automation (RPA).
“There were more than 500 RPAs implemented across functions in the last year, which resulted in 7,900 plus man hours of effort being saved every month. Also, 44 bots were deployed across applications, with which cumulatively nearly a million queries have been answered to date,” he says.
Employee-centric transformation
Live Enterprise has facilitated the transformation of a wide range of business operations at Infosys, from recruitment to code delivery, by integrating siloed applications and streamlining processes informed by data insights.
“Our digital transformation yielded cost reduction of $10 million. There was a 90% improvement in hardware and software readiness for better utilization and billing,” Sonawane says.
Moreover, the platform has helped Infosys keep its workforce fresh on the necessary skills to push the organization forward.
“Over 25,000 employees were digitally reskilled through the platform,” says Sonawane, adding that Live Enterprise has helped Infosys become a “smarter workplace” by “achieving major-league knowledge sharing,” AI-based continuous learning, and more streamlined business operations through process simplification and automation.
“With the reaffirmed confidence in the organization, we were able to bag some of the biggest deals during the peak of pandemic,” he says. “With many digital transformation journeys going astray after initial momentum, Infosys has been able to achieve set milestones along the way assuring client confidence, employee experience, and operational excellence.” Equipped with these advantages, Infosys is also taking this platform as a go-to-market solution to its clients under the brand name Orbit.
