Sogeti has chosen to invest in a global collaboration platform for its  20 000 employees spread across 100 offices in 15 countries. Following an extensive analysis, where all available options were reviewed, Sogeti turned to the technologies of its two strategic partners IBM (Lotus Connections) and Microsoft (SharePoint, OCS) for social networking and collaborative functionality.

Sogeti is one of the first companies in the world to use the updated version of the powerful collaboration platform from IBM. The work around the new collaboration platform has been based on the Sogeti TeamPark® approach, a registered trademark by Sogeti, especially created to manage client projects of collaboration platform implementation. The platform is based upon IBM Lotus Connections and Microsoft Office Communicator + Intelligent Application Gateway, with several SharePoint instances.

Luc-François Salvador

“Our people are our most valuable asset. As a multi-national company with 20,000 employees dispersed, from India to the US, we needed a powerful tool to connect our people and provide them with a social platform to share information and collaborate,” said Luc-François Salvador, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Sogeti Group. “We chose Lotus Connections because it is a powerful collaboration platform that goes way beyond simple sharing of documents and furthermore, it is people-centric rather than project or document-centric. We believe that this is the future of collaboration and we are pleased to be at the forefront of this new trend.”

The story behind TeamPark
The new collaboration platform is a direct result of Sogeti’s worldwide, collaborative and online brainstorm held in April 2008 that used social networking technologies to enable open dialogue between employees from different countries and time zones around the subject of building the ’Sogeti of the Future’. Every Sogeti employee was asked to contribute by generating, discussing and evaluating ideas focused on four key themes:

Our People; how to collaborate more efficiently
Our Clients; how to build closer and new relationships
Technology; how to use new technology, create new services and strong partnerships
Corporate Social Responsibility; how to contribute to make a world a better place

One concrete result of this initiative is the new global collaborative working environment named TeamPark, made available to all Sogeti employees worldwide in October 2009.

A people-centric platform for the future
TeamPark will enable all Sogeti employees to find and connect to the right person within the Group, wherever their location, against parameters such as work experience, interests, professional position, etc. The platform offers many social networking tools to share knowledge and collaborate virtually around technology, services and clients. TeamPark provides tools such as personal profile, communities, blogs, wikis, discussion forums, file share, bookmarks and activities. It is a people-centric system with a level of functionality, superior to other document or project-centric system currently on the market.

Michiel Boreel, Chief Technical Officer at Sogeti Group, commented:

Michiel Boreel

“This is the dawn of a new beginning. We are building a future Sogeti in which collaboration and social networking are key for delivering client solutions faster, connecting the right people wherever they are, and making Sogeti as a group a more attractive employer. Innovation and passion for technology will thrive and grow on TeamPark, a collaboration platform that has been developed to meet the needs of our people.”

Personal profile in the center of the platform