Esol Education News

Esol Education’s Chief Information Officer, Dr. Joseph Nettikaden was recently honored as the Middle East’s Top 100 CIOs by Computer News Middle East magazine. Endorsed by International Data Group, the award forms part of the Middle East edition of the CIO 100 Awards instituted in the United States over thirty years ago, recognizing innovations in technology that deliver business value. Esol Education was selected for their implementation of Microsoft’s corporate collaboration software, Yammer, which is bringing together Esol Education colleagues and teachers, launched in advance of the upcoming Esol Education Professional Development Conference in October 2015. Dr. Nettikaden shares:

"Being a geographically and culturally diverse organization with nine locations across UAE, Egypt, Cyprus and Lebanon, one of the organizational objectives for us to provide a secure and a private collaborative platform for our staff. Taking advantage of synergies across departments, we wanted staff to be able to share resources, ideas and extend their collaborative efforts in an online virtual manner.

For this, we chose a to implement a private sharing network provided by Microsoft called Yammer, modelled after social media platforms like Facebook, which is user-friendly and has a familiar interface that can lead to easy adoption. The idea here was to provide an avenue for our staff to communicate developments, good ideas or even raise concerns which can be addressed in a timely manner by management and company leadership. 

The solution also provides the opportunity for the members within the organization to stay connected online via their mobile devices as well through a mobile application. The overall objective is to enhance the collaboration and a foster a deeper sense of community utilizing a social collaboration technology platform. The expected outcomes is that of idea generation, getting members to be emotionally connected in a continual way to the objectives of the organization and also as a means of timely resolution of any organizational concerns.

The other key aspect of this initiative is that it allows us to focus on our organization mission and vision and not have to be concerned with a lot of hassles related to technology implementations and risks. In other words, for the IT department it puts the focus back on our organizational goals and people and not have to be concerned about the mundane operational tasks of keeping up and maintaining this technology platform."