SI International uses the latest advances in information technology to help its customers in the U.S. federal government respond to new global challenges. Its employees frequently face urgent deadlines on high-stakes projects. SI International wanted to use its employee portal site to help users quickly find internal data such as e-mail addresses, office locations, individuals with particular skills, and supervisor information. The solution would need to integrate easily with Active Directory® and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. SI International deployed Nakisa OrgManagement Series for Active Directory, including the product’s organization chart and floor plan module. A user can now see where colleagues are located, how to get in touch with them, where they fit into the company structure, and how they might help to overcome the challenges of a particular project.

Situation
SI International provides information technology and network solutions, primarily to customers in the U.S. federal government. Founded in 1998, SI International—a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner—employs more than 4,000 people. The company has 29 locations across the United States, and many of its employees work at more than 100 other customer sites. Much of the company’s work consists of providing highend architecture and advisory services to customers that need a fast response so that they can deliver critical services.

Three years ago, SI International began searching for ways to use the data in its implementation of the Active Directory® service to extend the functionality of its internal portal site, a resource available to all employees but not widely used. The company wanted to persuade employees to make more effective use of the information sources that were available to them on the site.

“We pride ourselves on the ability to quickly understand our customers’ needs and develop solutions within very short time frames,” says Steve Hunt, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at SI International. “For example, with only five months of advance notice, we deployed nuclear effects detection sensors in Greece for the 2004 Summer Olympics. Given that environment, we do everything possible to make sure that SI employees can find the people and resources they need to complete their projects on schedule and fulfill their customers’ needs. The portal plays a large role in enabling those types of connections.”

The company wanted the portal to provide new, genuine value to its employees so that they would see real benefits from using it. The solution that SI envisioned would take full advantage of the large amounts of data contained in Active Directory, and would be flexible enough to accommodate the company’s fast rate of growth through acquisitions.

Solution
SI International found that Nakisa OrgManagement Series for Active Directory, built on the Microsoft .NET Framework, met the company’s requirements and could deliver the benefits that SI was looking for. “We met some representatives from Nakisa at a 2003 Microsoft Partner conference,” says Hunt. “That meeting was very enlightening. We developed a real appreciation for what the technology could do and how easily it could be integrated with Active Directory.”

With Nakisa OrgManagement Series, users can access data such as organization charts and floor plans through a graphical display that is easy to understand and use. That data can come from any number of the company’s systems, such as the Active Directory service or an enterprise resource planning application.

“Our primary focus is on employee interaction,” says Babak Varjavandi, Chief Executive Officer at Nakisa. “By helping people to communicate and find resources more easily, our software has a tremendous effect on the day-to-day operations of a business.”

Within three weeks of placing the order for the software license, SI International had Nakisa OrgManagement Series installed and fully operational. The Nakisa elements appear on the home page of the SI International employee portal, which currently runs on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and will soon be upgraded to Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can quickly access organization charts and employee directories that contain telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and other internal information that makes it easy to discover whom to contact for information. As part of the Nakisa OrgManagement Series installation, SI International added the Nakisa FloorPlan module. That module gave users a way to find the physical location of their coworkers and resources such as conference rooms, computers, and even office furniture. “We started with our corporate headquarters in Reston, turning CAD drawings created by our architect into JPEG images,” says Hunt. “Then we drew a frame around the images to indicate what each space was—an office, a conference room, a data center, and so on. Nakisa’s software merged the images with data in Active Directory, and then, immediately, people ‘appeared’ in their offices on-screen. We could see who occupied each space, how to contact them, and where to find their supervisors.”

Benefits
With the easy-to-deploy Nakisa solution, SI International has made it easier to integrate massive numbers of new employees into its organization, streamline operations, and support employees in their daily work.

Increases Day-to-Day Efficiency
“We often say that we can help you save five minutes per employee every day by eliminating the need to do lengthy searches for basic corporate information,” says Varjavandi. “Five minutes doesn’t sound like a lot, until you multiply it by tens of thousands of employees. We do all that we can to help our customers around the world work more productively.”

The Nakisa solution helps SI International employees get fast access to information that makes a great difference to the success of vitally important projects—like the nuclear threat detection systems that protected attendees at the Olympics. Because they don’t have to search through numerous disconnected sources of data, employees can respond quickly and efficiently to the demands of the typical workday.

The portal site is configured so that employees working outside the office can also access it easily and securely from any Internet-connected computer. Some of the information in the portal is also accessible to SI International business partners and subcontractors.

“When you’re working to deliver a successful project, you want access to the people who can best help you solve specific issues,” says Hunt. “Our online resume search capability is linked to Active Directory and the Nakisa solution, so that your search results can tell you that three people at the Colorado Springs location have the requirements you’re looking for. It opens up an opportunity for more face-to-face communication with people. Even if you don’t know those people directly, you have ready access to their skills and their experience.”

Helps Break Down Organizational Barriers
With the Nakisa solution, SI International can overcome the persistent challenge of providing employees with current information about its organizational structure. “We wanted to eliminate the ad hoc organizational charts that people would create because there was no universally accessible chart that they could refer to,” says Hunt. “By providing them with these tools and technologies and a consistent source of data, we’ve dramatically reduced the number of nonstandard charts in circulation in our company.”

Because SI International employees work in campuses across the United States as well as at customer locations, the company takes care to ensure that everyone works effectively together as a single company, rather than as a collection of isolated offices and departments. The Nakisa solution is an important part of the company’s main intranet portal, which also helps to break down organizational and geographic barriers. “We’re using the portal to create a virtual community for a work force that’s spread out through more than 130 locations,” says Hunt. “In that environment, keeping track of what’s going on is a constant, day-to-day challenge. That’s why the information that we can now access from Active Directory is so important. Everyone has a virtual view of where all other employees are working, who their supervisors are, and what customers they’re working with, and every user can access that information very quickly, right on the home page of the company portal.”

Is Easy to Implement
By using Active Directory, Nakisa and SI International made implementing the solution fast and easy. “The solution was very simple and straightforward to deploy,” says Hunt. “Because the data comes from Active Directory, there was no data entry to do.”

The company’s system administrators made two simple changes in Active Directory to get the functionality that they needed. One was to add a room number value, and the other was to index the employee ID value. By enabling fast searches by employee ID, SI International provided a way for the Nakisa software to locate people much more quickly without exposing confidential information such as their Social Security numbers.

Streamlines Acquisitions and Physical Moves
“We pride ourselves on having a onecompany view of our organization. Everybody is fully a part of SI International from the first moment of an acquisition, and we work hard to make sure that everyone feels that sense of belonging,” says Hunt. “We now have an easy way to tell 2,000 new employees, ‘Here’s who you work for, here’s who you work with, and here’s where your desk is.’ That is a huge part of making people feel like they’re a part of the company and giving them a good understanding of what role they play.”

As an example, Hunt cites the move in April 2006 of 450 employees to a new campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado. That location has two buildings and more than 121,000 square feet of office space, and the company was moving more than 450 people from three different locations. “Nakisa FloorPlan was a crucial tool for letting people know where they could find the person who used to be across the hall,” says Hunt. “In the middle of the afternoon on Friday, 450 people finished work at the old location. By 8:00 A.M. Monday morning, they were fully operational and supporting their customers in the new campus.”

Microsoft .NET
Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.

.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.