Global Contact Information at a Click: The Corporate Phonebook

Our Client

Our client is a global insurer serving clients in over 210 countries and territories. It provides a wide range of products and services in the broad areas of general and commercial insurance, life insurance, and insurance to farmers. It caters to individuals, small and mid-sized busineses, and larger multinational corporations. Nearly 150 years old, the company was listed on Forbes amongst the 100 largest public companies.

The Business Challenge

When you’re part of an organization with 54,000 employees spread out across four geographical locations, it makes working easier if you can find contact information for your colleagues easily. However, the Client was missing a system that made it easy to search for people using their name, location or designation; any existing information was further obstructed by incomplete databases. The Client was also undergoing a major enterprise-wide change, as they decided to shift platforms from Lotus Notes to Office 365.

The Client identified the need for a Corporate Phonebook and decided to work with a trusted partner to design and build this solution, which would allow its employees easy access to contact information across its different locations.

The company wanted a Phonebook that was focused on the following goals:

1. Provide ease of access to employee information for people within the organization
2. Present a hierarchical view by showing contact information for a colleague’s manager and direct reports through a three-level organizational chart
3. Enable access over the Web as well as on company-provided mobile devices
4. Ensure quick response times

Our Solution

Based on the goals and needs of the company, DelphianLogic conceptualised the Corporate Phonebook solution as a Web-based application and a mobile application. The concept was developed in several phases.

1. We developed a web-based application accessible to all the employees connected to the company’s Intranet
2. Separate apps for iOS and Android were developed, using a common code-base. Using the mobile phone app to search for contact information allows for integration with smartphone features, allowing one to make phone calls, save contact cards, or view their location on Google maps. A three-level organizational chart is easily available.
3. The response time for loading results was made quicker by storing all the information in a database server, synced to the active directory each morning. Each request is then served through Web API calls.
4. An autocomplete feature was implemented as a part of the Search, which allows for one to search for an employee without knowing their full name. The search function also allows for a combination of an employee’s name and department to be used, so as to filter to a specific contact.