GlobalLogic: Creating a culture of global innovation in digital product engineering
About GlobalLogic
GlobalLogic provides digital product engineering services and agile software delivery to customers worldwide, partnering with customers to accelerate their digital transformations.
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Contact usTo share knowledge and drive innovation among more than 11,000 employees worldwide, GlobalLogic moved to Google Workspace and built a robust and cost-effective content management system on Sites and Google Cloud Platform.
Google Cloud Results
- Supports knowledge sharing and innovation to deliver the best products as fast as possible
- Saves time for engineering teams by documenting solutions to solve future problems
- Significant reduction in content management costs compared to other enterprise solutions
Up to 3-fold faster turnaround times for customers
As technology increasingly shapes consumer experiences, it’s often said that most every company today is becoming a software company. Businesses in all industries, even large technology companies with their own development teams, are turning to full-lifecycle software development companies such as GlobalLogic for help in designing and executing their digital transformation strategies while remaining focused on their core competencies.
GlobalLogic uses the latest technologies, tools, and software development practices to help customers bring new products to market and modernize existing products, while delivering faster and better outcomes than customers could achieve on their own.
GlobalLogic maintains a geographically dispersed presence to best serve its global customer base, with more than 11,000 employees across 30 delivery centers in 12 countries. To enable seamless collaboration, GlobalLogic moved from using traditional collaboration and productivity tools to Google Workspace, eliminating costly email infrastructure and connecting teams around the world with real-time collaboration. Engineers began storing their documents on Drive, dramatically improving information access and process efficiency.
“Google Workspace transformed the way we work and run our business, and it just keeps getting better,” says Deepak Gupta, Vice President of Technology at GlobalLogic. “We love it. We would never go back.”
But Google Workspace was only the first step in GlobalLogic’s journey toward creating a culture of global innovation. The company wanted to take knowledge sharing a step further and bring valuable content stored in emails, attachments, and personal Drive storage into a companywide portal to share best practices. To this end, the company formed a team within the Technology Practices Group to assess different technologies and implement a solution.
“We needed a single place to store all our internal engineering resources, including case studies, blogs, tech papers, and proofs of concept for customers. We decided to go ‘all in’ on Google Cloud, which allowed us to put together a more secure, elegant, and cost-effective solution for our Practices Portal.”
—Faisal Mushtaq, VP Technology & Global Cloud Practice, GlobalLogic“GlobalLogic operates in a people industry,” Deepak explains. “People come in, people leave, and roles change frequently. We wanted a way to help ensure that, where appropriate, personal knowledge becomes institutional knowledge that can be easily leveraged to drive innovation and solve problems faster for our customers. Google Workspace helps us do this.”
Building a global knowledge base
The Technology Practices Group began looking for a streamlined way to bring together content from all of its delivery centers, most of it already stored in Google Workspace. It decided to use Sites to publish and share content internally, combined with Google Cloud Platform and Google Developers services to extend the portal’s functionality and build a new internal app.
“We needed a single place to store all our internal engineering resources, including case studies, blogs, tech papers, and proofs of concept for customers,” says Faisal Mushtaq, VP Technology & Global Cloud Practice at GlobalLogic. “We decided to go ‘all in’ on Google Cloud, which allowed us to put together a more secure, elegant, and cost-effective solution for our Practices Portal.”
GlobalLogic chose Google because of the wide variety of services available, the ease of integration between them, and Google’s ongoing commitment to data security. Because Sites is included with GlobalLogic’s Google Workspace Enterprise licensing, the company saved significantly by not having to purchase a separate content management system.
“The Practices Portal we built on Google Cloud Platform and Google Developers services perfectly complements our Google Workspace toolset, and we are definitely seeing faster turnaround times for customers. Our employees are more empowered to innovate, and we see those benefits on a daily basis.”
—Deepak Gupta, VP Technology, GlobalLogicGlobalLogic’s Practice Portal architecture is built on a variety of Google Cloud services (see Figure 1) to enable the following innovative features and benefits:
● Conversational interfaces: Actions on Google powered with Dialogflow Enterprise Edition captures user interactions from Google Assistant on mobile devices and Google Home, while Dialogflow integrations interface with Amazon Alexa and Skype, using natural language processing to enable rich interactions with users. The front-end engine feeds into Firebase, which provides a webhook that links into the API gateway for real-time information exchange. GlobalLogic also uses Cloud Functions for Firebase to automatically run back-end code in response to events in a serverless environment, as well as the Dialogflow integrated code editor to natively build serverless applications linked to its conversational interface through Cloud Functions for Firebase.
● An extensible web tier: Google Apps Script allows GlobalLogic to easily extend and customize its Google Workspace apps and connect dynamic code to the backend, sending data out for scoring, ranking, and tagging, and then back to the API gateway for user consumption.
● Flexible API management: Using Cloud Endpoints, GlobalLogic can easily develop, deploy, and manage APIs without worrying about authentication or performance.
● Serverless computing: Cloud Pub/Sub ingests content topics from the web tier and delivers event messages to Cloud Functions for convenient, serverless data processing to generate notifications and annotations.
● World-class security and granular access control: GlobalLogic’s intellectual property and software code are protected with the Google Cloud security model, which offers encryption at rest by default. Managing resource permissions with Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM) enables GlobalLogic to grant access to portal resources at fine-grained levels, well beyond project-level access.
● Integrated chat rooms: GlobalLogic recently began using Google Chat to provide portal users with chat rooms accessible from any mobile device. “We’re promoting Chat as a Slack replacement for security reasons,” says Deepak. “If an engineer leaves our company, they remain part of the Slack workspace or channel, which is not the case with Chat.”
Faster project deliveries
GlobalLogic’s engineers and project managers now check the portal before and during their planning sessions to determine whether any existing knowledge or solutions apply to the problem they are currently working on. For example, a team in California can now effortlessly identify and leverage an innovation that occurred a month ago in Argentina. Because engineers don’t have to spend time reinventing the wheel, they can build on prior innovations with additional customizations and enhancements to exceed customers’ expectations.
“The Practices Portal we have built on Google Cloud Platform and Google Developers services perfectly complements our Google Workspace toolset, and we are definitely seeing faster turnaround times for customers,” says Deepak. “Our employees are more motivated and empowered to innovate, and we see those benefits on a daily basis.”
GlobalLogic employees have submitted and published more than 200 proofs-of-concept (PoCs) since the Practices Portal launched, using an internal global Gitlab server where source code of all PoCs is maintained. Engineers can fork the source code of an existing PoC and extend or reuse the code for building new use cases on top of it, truly realizing the mantra of distributed collaboration. “We are not only seeing good inflow of PoC submissions, but also an increase in rate of submission, which is a clear indicator of higher motivation and reuse,” says Deepak.
Similarly, more than 100 global webinars are archived on the Practices Portal along with what GlobalLogic calls tech nuggets, such as white papers, case studies, tech talks, and blogs. GlobalLogic has also released an incremental employee profile builder that tracks submissions to the Practices Portal and displays them on a dedicated web page for each employee. The system calculates a score based on submission count and type of tech nugget, and displays the employee’s points along with badges and stars. Current top 10 innovators are displayed on each practice page. To encourage continuing innovation, newer submissions are weighted more heavily in the scoring engine.
Another feature tracks the usage of each tech nugget in day-to-day work activities of an employee: which nugget was used, showcased, or referred to in specific client-facing activities such as pre-sales, project delivery, or advisory. The system then generates points against each tech nugget based on its usage instance. Employee receive points for using any tech nugget for client-facing activity, nurturing the culture of stop reinventing the wheel.
“We have used Google Cloud solutions to help create a marketplace with both push and pull forces, making our ecosystem self-sustaining and inspiring our people to contribute and reuse,” adds Deepak.
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About GlobalLogic
GlobalLogic provides digital product engineering services and agile software delivery to customers worldwide, partnering with customers to accelerate their digital transformations.