The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is an independent humanitarian organization helping people forced to flee. NRC is a determined advocate for displaced people and promotes and defends their rights and dignity. NRC has 7,500 employees worldwide. Most staff are hired locally where NRC’s assistance is needed, and a small number are based at the headquarters in Oslo.
Norbot – the digital assistant
When a humanitarian crisis occurs, NRC’s NORCAP experts stand ready to assist the UN and other organizations. In such a situation, it is crucial that the seconded experts quickly become operational and get in touch with the onsite teams.
The Workplace from Meta bot named Norbot, automates this process by enrolling experts in local Workplace groups, as well as informing of their eminent arrival and initiating dialogue with relevant colleagues already in the field. Norbot confirms these automated processes with the responsible manager through an individualized Workplace Chat dialogue. Norbot performs chat, integration, and group operations.
Workplace from Meta at NRC
Norwegian Refugee Council was quick to see the value of enterprise social networking and is an early adopter of Workplace from Meta. Cloudworks’ cloud architects were engaged to integrate Workplace from Meta with the organization’s existing Identity and Access Management solution from Okta, and assist with the onboarding of NRC employees.
Today, NRC’s staff and associated experts can connect and collaborate in a secure Workplace environment, making the NRC Workplace installation one of the world’s largest and most diverse humanitarian knowledge databases.
Bot-as-a-Service from Cloudworks
In spring 2017 Meta opened for bots on Workplace, and soon after NRC and Cloudworks started discussing developing a Workplace bot. September the same year, Norbot was launched. At the end of 2017, Norbot had become a central part of NRC’s global expert secondment procedure. New candidates are now connected to peers at location 600 times faster than before. This means that they ultimately have more time to do more good!
In cooperation with Cloudworks, we developed Norbot, our first robotic process automation assistant. Norbot streamlines NRC’s crisis response by reducing delays, increasing quality and reliability of our processes. Partnering with Cloudworks’ experienced developers were crucial in this pioneering robotic process automation work, adapting the technical solution optimally to our needs.
Peter Schiøler, Special Adviser Knowledge Technology at Norwegian Refugee Council
