Filipino IT professionals build Facebook-like application

[pioneer]

By Lawrence Casiraya
INQUIRER.net

A team of Filipino IT professionals is responsible for creating Accenture's own social networking tool that allows collaboration among the company's workers worldwide.

Aptly called Accenture People, it resembles popular social networking sites much like Facebook, and allows employees to create their own profiles.

But more than a listing of hobbies and other personal interests, these profiles provide a glimpse of each employee's role in Accenture, including technical expertise and the projects in which he or she was involved.

For a global company with numerous business units like Accenture, the idea is to simply make everyone more familiar with each other's background and then encourage knowledge sharing.

In the Philippines alone, Accenture has around 15,000 workers doing management consulting, system integration and BPO (business process outsourcing). In terms of size, the Philippines is behind only to the US and India in Accenture's global network.