Building the foundations for effective 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.
It requires a solid KM foundation and strong KM practices to formally manage its knowledge supply chain to stay ahead of the competition.
In the September/October 2008 issue of KM Review, Dr JK Suresh and Dr Kavi Mahesh from Infosys explain how KM has been used by the company to sustain productivity, efficiency and high quality standards, during a period of growth that has seen it recruit a huge number of new employees.
Read on to discover the 6 key elements that make up Infosys' KM initiative.
Infosys began its KM initiative in 1999 with a strategy that featured six key elements:
1. A KM team in the learning unit
Infosys management decided to locate the KM team in its Education & Research (E&R) group, outside of its mainline business units. To enable the team to enforce changes in the organization as a whole, they bolstered the KM team's influence by giving it a high-level steering committee that included many members of the board of directors and several other heads of business units.
2. A decentralized architecture
Content management is handled by establishing a set of satellite repositories, owned by local groups and affiliated with the central KM repository. The central KM team coordinates the KM promotion effort, with a large network of KM "promoters" across business units who are responsible for promoting KM in their respective teams.
3. Incremental scope
The KM solution at Infosys was rolled out incrementally, first to a few research units and other support functions, then to several technical groups in the service delivery units. Only after covering most of the technical community was the solution extended to cover customer-facing groups, such as sales and marketing.
4. Content first, then collaboration
The KM solution was initially all content-based. This strategy, based on the theory that ramping up sufficient content for the chosen target audience will make the rollout of the KM solution to that audience successful, has worked very well. Only after the content-based solution had generated sufficient enthusiasm and support across the organization were other elements developed to support collaboration.
5. Voluntary participation
An important principle for KM at Infosys has been not to force employees to use the KM system. In the early stages, direct incentives were offered for participation. Later in its KM journey, the promotion scheme was changed to focus more on awards and recognition, rather than monetary rewards.
6. An in-house solution
While specialized KM products have been evaluated periodically for various functionalities, even those products touted by suppliers as "comprehensive KM solutions" have never been able to cater to all of the company's KM requirements.
Therefore, Infosys chose to build its systems in-house. "We have learned not to invest large amounts of resources or make sweeping changes across the organization in a short period of time to get quick returns from KM," say the authors. "KM is a slow and incremental process. Economy in all aspects of deploying a KM solution, we believe, leads to a great acceptance of KM and yields better results over time."
