Customer Solution Case Study

Cognizant Boosts Efficiency, Cuts Costs, with Collaboration and Development Platform

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Professional services—IT services

Customer ProfileCognizant provides IT, consulting, and business process outsourcing. It has more than 50 global delivery centers and close to 95,000 employees. It is headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Business SituationCognizant wants to make it easier for employees to find information, use applications, and connect with others.

SolutionCognizant is using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as the foundation of its new intranet to gain enhanced content management, personalized workspaces, and an application development environment.

Benefits Easier access to information and

applications Lower development and

maintenance costs Collaboration and other tools boost

competitive advantage

“Our new intranet will boost our competitive advantage…. Higher efficiency, lower costs, easier access to data—we will achieve all of those things with our SharePoint Server 2010-based solution.”

William Doyle, Enterprise Architect, Cognizant

Cognizant, a global provider of IT, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, had outgrown its systems for creating internal business applications. The company wanted to create a standardized, more efficient environment for application development and use. The company also wanted to improve content management and implement tools that would encourage deeper connections among employees. Cognizant became an early adopter of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, which it used to prototype a new intranet. Through the portal, the company can improve employees’ access to information, deliver standardized business applications, and boost collaboration. Cognizant believes that the new intranet and the tools it provides will result in productivity gains, lower development costs, better customer service, and ultimately, higher revenues.

SituationCognizant is a New Jersey–based provider of IT, consulting, and business process outsourcing services. The company has a broad global reach, with delivery centers in more than 50 locations worldwide, staffed by nearly 95,000 employees. Cognizant has developed a winning model for global delivery that combines local and overseas resources to provide excellent, cost-effective customer service.

The company has grown rapidly, expanding a presence that was once primarily focused in the United States and India to more than 40 countries. Cognizant now manages more than 12,000 outsourcing projects from development centers in Hungary, Argentina, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, China, Canada, India, and the United States.

With such a broad footprint and many customers to serve, effective collaboration and communication among employees is critical. However, the company lacked the ability to easily manage its intranet-based content or to localize applications in different languages. It also wanted to streamline the development of internal applications, and make them easier for employees to find and use. Finally, Cognizant wanted to introduce a more efficient way for employees to make personal connections and be able to collaborate.

Content Management ChallengesAs Cognizant grew, so did the volume of internal documents and data that it managed on its intranet, which included

forms, policies, and information about the company’s vertical markets and solution offerings. “The amount of content that we serve and the distributed nature of content ownership made maintaining the content time consuming. We knew that implementing a more sophisticated governance model would help us function more efficiently,” says William Doyle, Enterprise Architect at Cognizant.

The company also lacked the tools it needed to make it easy to localize intranet content. “Geography is hugely important to this company,” says Doyle. “We have development arms all around the world, and we didn’t have the ability to publish content in multiple languages. Adding this capability would allow us to provide better service to our multinational employee base.”

Decentralized Application Development The company’s rapid growth also contributed to a proliferation of internal business applications, many of which reside at unique URLs, and rely on differently-styled user interfaces (UIs). “The learning curve for figuring out where to go to perform a certain task is very high,” says Doyle. ”We wanted to make our applications available from a central location, and with a common UI, so that the user experience would be more seamless.”

Collaboration CapabilitiesCognizant also wanted tools that could help employees make personal connections. “We want our employees to be able to reach out to others who might

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“The amount of content that we serve and the distributed nature of content ownership made maintaining the content time consuming.”

William Doyle, Enterprise Architect, Cognizant

share common interests or be involved in similar work,” says Doyle.

Enterprisewide InitiativeIn 2008, the Cognizant Chief Executive Officer (CEO) challenged the Enterprise Application Services group with improving the way the company managed and maintained its business applications. “The CEO wanted to improve how the company presents itself to its employees,” says Doyle. “He wanted to provide a platform that would enable our employees to participate in business processes in as seamless a manner as possible.” The CEO’s objective would give the company a comprehensive platform for enterprise content management, application development, and collaboration.

SolutionIn 2009, Cognizant evaluated a prerelease version of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for its new intranet. “The product hadn’t yet reached beta,” explains Doyle. “While were wary of relying on a prerelease product for such a major initiative, the new features were so compelling and held the promise of solving so many problems for us that we were willing to move ahead.” In January 2010, the Enterprise Application Services group designed a prototype intranet and piloted the solution to a subset of users.

Cognizant is currently developing its full-fledged intranet solution, which includes three primary components: an enterprise content management system; an environment for building business applications; and customizable

workspaces for employees that will provide access to these applications and eventually include social networking tools. Constructing a Solid Enterprise Content Management EnvironmentTo provide consistent communications enterprisewide, Cognizant is taking advantage of out-of-the-box support for multilingual experiences in SharePoint Server 2010. Site owners will be able to configure fields within lists to support multiple languages, and, when employees create new content, they can also publish translations.

To make information easy to find, the company will apply metadata tags to its content, according to a centrally defined corporate taxonomy. As users upload new content to the system, they can add tags manually, and Cognizant will also be able to automatically extract metadata from newly published content. “Implementing metadata tagging is critical for us,” says Doyle. “It will allow us to provide users with context-relevant search results.” Searches based on metadata tags allow employees to find information anywhere it is located—in folders, lists and document libraries, sites, and site collections.

Compliance features available in SharePoint Server 2010, such as version management and retention schedules, combined with the multilingual capabilities and metadata tagging that Cognizant is using, will help the company “construct a very solid content management environment,” says Doyle.

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Due to the company's size and geographic distribution, there are many different categories of users, some of which may include only a handful of people. Cognizant relies on a custom-developed role-management system based on the Microsoft .NET Framework to maintain this complex environment. Using the claims-based security model of SharePoint Server 2010, Cognizant can connect the portal to its role-management system to provide users with role-based access to content and other resources. “Our intranet has to offer a very personalized experience based on an employee’s level, department, or geographic location,” says Doyle.

For instance, the Human Resources department maintains a set of forms or “service” letters that employees can use to furnish, for example, proof of employment. “There are only a handful of individuals in the company who have the authority to approve these letters, and each letter may require different approvers,” explains Doyle. “With SharePoint Server 2010, we can set up a very specific approver role in our role-management system. We can, say, designate an individual as an approver for a particular service letter for the North America region. It's much easier to maintain roles that are this specific, outside of our standard directory service.”

Creating a Platform for Application DevelopmentCognizant worked with Microsoft Services to create a gallery of preconfigured web parts—the “building

blocks” of SharePoint sites—which can be personalized to meet each Cognizant employee’s needs for displaying and manipulating content. Instead of building standalone applications, developers and business users will rely on these web parts to create standardized applications. Developers used Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010, and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 to build the web parts, which connect to data and information stored in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software. Access to the web parts and the information they provide is also governed by the company’s role management system.

So, for example, the Cognizant Finance department can create an application to showcase profitability using one of the web parts in the intranet gallery. A manager can configure a web part to display profitability data for a specific geographic region, and then distribute the web part to a select group of employees. “Authorized people in each department can use the web parts to customize a dashboard for their users,” says Doyle. “Depending on who I am in the organization, I may have access to profitability information at the project level, account level, or perhaps for an entire vertical industry.”

Perhaps the single most important aspect of the project is the introduction of personalized workspaces. Doyle explains, “Workspaces act as canvasses that users can populate themselves, by using various web parts that present content, data, or application

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“With SharePoint Server 2010, we can set up a very specific approver role in our role-management system.”

William Doyle, Enterprise Architect, Cognizant

functionality. This will be a platform for application development.”

Building a Collaboration EnvironmentIn an effort to enhance collaboration and build stronger connections among employees, Cognizant also plans to implement SharePoint Server 2010 social networking features.

BenefitsCognizant is using SharePoint Server 2010 to develop a new company intranet that will provide employees with easier access to documents, information, and business applications. Cognizant expects to improve employee productivity and significantly reduce time spent developing and maintaining business applications. With strong support from Microsoft, Cognizant was able to take advantage of a new technology, early, for significant competitive gain. Easier Access to Information and ApplicationsThe SharePoint Server 2010-based intranet will help the company meet the goals of the intranet refresh initiative, which is to provide employees with a seamless experience as they access the information and tools they need to do their jobs. With the enterprise content management enhancements, they will be able to find documents, information, and expertise more easily, and collaborate more effectively with globally dispersed teams. “Our content will be fresher, easier to find, and easier to localize because we will be using metadata tagging, applying stronger versioning and compliance standards, and taking advantage of multilingual capabilities,” says Doyle.

Through the portal, employees will access business applications within their information workspaces. “We’re going to be able to consolidate our interface experiences into a standardized business application environment,” says Doyle. The ease of use that the new intranet provides will result in significant efficiency gains. “Our new intranet will boost our competitive advantage,” says Doyle. “Web parts help us provide higher-quality tools that are easier to reproduce. Higher efficiency, lower costs, easier access to data—we will achieve all of those things with our SharePoint Server 2010-based solution.”

Lower Development and Maintenance CostsTraditionally, Cognizant has taken a cautious approach to the adoption of new technologies. “We realized, though,” says Doyle, “that we could not achieve what we wanted to without SharePoint Server 2010.” As an early adopter of the technology, Cognizant feels that it received strong support from Microsoft Services, which helped the company connect its role management system to the claims-based authentication technology in SharePoint Server 2010, and create a foundation for its web part gallery and information workspace model. “Microsoft really helped us move forward quickly with the new technology,” says Doyle. “Without SharePoint Server 2010 and the support from Microsoft, we would have had to build a platform ourselves, from scratch, and that would have resulted in a huge expense to the company. The fact that

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we jumped on this opportunity early will result in huge gains, enterprisewide.”

The information workspaces and the web part gallery will help reduce the time Cognizant spends creating and maintaining business applications. “As our inventory of web parts grows, costs will come down as we will be able to go to our inventory of web parts, and without any custom programming, enable a new business process application with just minor reconfigurations,” says Doyle. “With SharePoint Server 2010, we are creating reusable assets.” With built-in UI standards, and standardized, centralized access to applications through information workspaces, “developers don’t have to spend time on UI or interaction models—they can just focus on solving business problems,” says Doyle.

The new solution provides a complete development platform for Cognizant. “SharePoint Server 2010 provides a critical set of capabilities for building any business application the company needs,” says Doyle. “If we had implemented a different development environment, we’d have had to spend a lot of time and money setting up servers,

databases, creating a new team to support it, and so on.”

Collaboration and Other Tools Boost Competitive EdgeThe company believes that SharePoint Server 2010 social networking tools, combined with the solution’s enterprise content management advances, as well as easy access to business applications, will help employees find information and expertise faster, resulting in productivity gains, better customer service, and ultimately, higher revenues. Doyle concludes, “With SharePoint Server 2010, we have an intranet solution that supports enterprise content management, application development, and collaboration—all in one.”

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the Web.

For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, go to:www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Cognizant products and services, call (888) 937-3277 or visit the website at: www.cognizant.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published November 2010

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio−Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010−Microsoft SharePoint Designer

2010−Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Enterprise Microsoft Visual Studio−Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Ultimate

Services−Microsoft Services

Technologies−Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

“SharePoint Server 2010 provides a critical set of capabilities for building any business application the company needs.”

William Doyle, Enterprise Architect, Cognizant