Dr Kavi Mahesh
is principal KM
consultant at
Infosys and a
professor in the
Department of
Computer
Science at the
PES Institute of
Technology in
Bangalore, where
he teaches the
theory of information
Dr JK Suresh
is associate vice
president and
principal
knowledge
manager for the
Infosys group of
companies. He is
widely published
in aerospace
engineering,
application
performance
testing, software
engineering,
methodologies and KM.
How does a fast-growing organization in a dynamic industry use KM to sustain its competitiveness and market leadership? Just ask Infosys Technologies Limited, an IT consulting and services organization headquartered in Bangalore, India.
Founded in 1981, the company has grown at a compound annual rate of nearly 50 percent over the last decade and reported revenues of US $4.1 billion in its most recent financial year. It employs more than 75,000 people worldwide and has been a winner of the Asian Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) Awards every year since its 2002 inception and of the Global MAKE Awards every year since 2003.
Infosys operates globally, primarily servicing Global 1,000 clients located in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. It has 13 development centers in India, ten across the rest of world, and marketing offices in some 30 countries. This vast organizational network has grown up against a backdrop of explosive demand. The late 1990s saw an increasing acceptance of IT outsourcing at organizations across the world, resulting in the need for greater geographic dispersion, technological flux and functional specialization for companies such as Infosys. That led to a growing realization within Infosys that it would require strong practices to formally manage its knowledge supply chain to stay ahead of the competition.
Consequently, the company’s Education and Research (E&R) group was entrusted by top management with the responsibility for developing KM as a formal initiative. Today, the E&R unit is responsible primarily for training both new and experienced employees in software engineering technologies, methodologies and project management. Infosys has put in place an extensive infrastructure to support education and learning and spends around 5 percent of its revenues on these activities every year.
Continuous learning and knowledge exchange
It’s interesting to note that several company characteristics have made it easier to build and deploy a KM solution at Infosys. These are an environment of continuous learning and knowledge exchange, consciously developed over the years by senior management; a willingness to experiment with new ideas; and a high degree of voluntarism on part of the large number of young software developers in the organization.
When the KM strategy was conceived by Infosys, its primary goal was to ensure that productivity, efficiency and high quality standards were sustained even as the company inducted ever-larger numbers of new employees into its workforce. New employees had to be enabled with the knowledge and experience of their seniors so that every project benefited from the collective knowledge of the entire company.
At the same time, since Infosys was rapidly becoming so large that informal networks and acquaintances were inadequate for anyone to know all the experts throughout the company, there was a strong need for a formal, system-driven solution to determine who knew what.
Other KM objectives for Infosys were:
- to increase re-use of knowledge assets;
- to achieve higher functional efficiencies and competitive advantages;
- to apply knowledge to reduce defect rates even further;
- to de-risk the company’s core software services business by capturing higher-end consulting markets through the effective use of knowledge;
- and to enhance the brand value of the company.
KM may be rightly regarded as a rigorous change management exercise that can be characterized as a journey rather than an end in itself. In turn, this exercise facilitates the conceptualization of KM as a staged evolution of knowledge exchange processes in the organization.
The health, performance and business benefits of these processes can be assessed through a framework of measurements appropriate to each stage. Progress, meanwhile, can be monitored and steered through a staged maturity model. Accordingly, a five-level maturity model for KM was developed as an overarching basis for the KM strategy, activities and plans of Infosys.
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