In 2017, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, realized that the company needed a new talent development strategy to prepare its employees for the future of work, particularly a learning ecosystem that could support an enterprise-wide digital and talent transformation.
The following year, Thirumala Arohi, Infosys’s Senior Vice President and Head of Education, Training and Assessment, and his team developed Wingspan: a first-of-its-kind digital learning environment with internally developed content as well as content from Infosys’s external alliance partners. Wingspan was initially tightly integrated with other Infosys systems, but eventually it became a full-fledged product offered to Infosys’s corporate clients.
In 2020, Wingspan’s adoption got an unexpected boost due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Infosys staff migrated to online learning, by the end of the year nearly 220,000 employees had collectively chalked up over three million hours of learning time on Wingspan. By March 2021, more than one million client users relied on Wingspan through their own organisational learning platforms.
The case study shows how Wingspan had managed to achieve scale while embodying Arohi’s opinion that Infosys was a company where, “lifelong learning is the North Star for organisational progress and talent development.” In early 2022, Arohi wondered what was next for Wingspan.
This case study is suitable for postgraduate and executive courses, such as Corporate Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Growth Management, Talent Development, Digital Transformation Strategy, and others. Students will learn about 1) the key factors behind a successful large-scale implementation of a digital platform; 2) the importance and role of knowledge management in organisations; 3) corporate entrepreneurship; 4) the benefits and drawbacks of being part of a business ecosystem; and 5) the dynamic nature of digital transformation for a digital company.
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· Teaching Note (SMU-22-0030TN)
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