Toolbelt & Virtual Colleague

Conception, design and implementation of a toolbelt of interstitial tools, that exist between UNOPS (a UN agency) products, to support colleagues’ daily work.

The product is a direct response to the agency’s difficulty in realising its investment in knowledge due to disparate sources and an incredibly diverse user base. Tools included for the initial release- a product launchpad, an organisational knowledge finder (based on Google Vertex AI) with a virtual colleague (based on Google Vertex AI) and a centralised notifications/actions channel following in a subsequent release.

Vision

Tools & Applications

Enhance our colleagues ability to work by providing tools that are aware of our organisational context, within our application landscape but not part of applications.

Tools

Enhance colleague satisfaction and efficiency by leveraging tools for improved utilisation of both in-house and SaaS applications, while also addressing tasks beyond the scope of our existing application landscape.

Actions

Whilst remaining apart from applications tools can make use of integrations to interact with them and allow users to perform quick actions out with an application context.

How Might This Look?

Initially Toolbelt plans to address four key needs.

• Application discoverability.
• Knowledge surfacing.
• Virtual colleague.
• Prompts & actions

Application Discovery

UNOPS has an extensive application landscape which is constantly evolving. Coupled with this UNOPS has an incredibly diverse workforce which is constantly evolving. New, and existing, colleagues find it a challenge to locate known applications and discover new ones.

Launchpad

Launchpad is a Toolbelt tool that supports application discovery and allows users to use predefined application lists or create their own custom lists. It supports a set of core applications that are important to the organisation but also allows users to add their own applications and other URLs.

Knowledge Surfacing

UNOPS has a large unrealised investment in structured and unstructured data. This exists in a large number of disparate repositories across BigQuery, Drive, Atlassian Confluence & Jira amongst others. It is challenging for colleagues to know of the existence of these repositories, which repositories may contain the desired information and how to search for it.

Find

Find is a Toolbelt tool that supports a single interface for colleagues to search for the desired information across the range of available repositories.

Virtual Colleague

Having a "virtual colleague" to assist on the tedious tasks would free up time for more creative collaboration with human colleagues, strengthening relationships, and emphasising strategic thinking. This would enhance innovation and quality in the professional environment.

Omni

Omni is a Toolbelt tool that supports colleagues in a conversational manner with knowledge discovery, creative input and other convenient task completions.

Prompts & Actions

Many applications within the UNOPS landscape require colleagues to perform actions when prompted. Common mechanisms of prompting are email and in-app notifications. Colleagues are experiencing increasingly overloaded inboxes and prompts can be missed. In-app notifications are by nature only discovered when a colleague is in the app.

Updates

Updates is a Toolbelt tool that provides a common point to surface prompts from many applications and a means to easily complete simple actions without navigating to the app. This can allow users to complete many actions without the additional cognitive load of application context switching.

The Product