Presented By: Mehraj BatoolSubmitted to: Sir. M.B. Sial

MBA 4 (A) EveningDepartment of

Management Sciences

Knowledge Management

Infosys' Knowledge ManagementInitiatives

CASE STUDY

INTRODUCTION Infosys was incorporated as lnfosys Consultants Private Limited on July 02, 1981 by a group ofseven professionals. From the beginning, Infosys relied heavily on overseas business.

One of the founders, Narayana Murthy (Murthy) stayed in India, while the others went to the US to carry out onsite programming for corporate clients. One of Infosys' first clients was the US-based sportsshoe manufacturer Reebok.

INTRODUCTION CONT… Infosys hired its first set of employees in 1982 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.

These employees were provided training and were sent abroad for onsite projects.

After its revenues started increasing, Infosys started spending more on training and product development.

The company's revenues in 1982 were Rs 1.2 million.

INTRODUCTION CONT…At that time, computers were not manufactured in India.

A task like importing a computer required a license and the process would take several months.

lnfosys did not have the required space to install many computers, so the computers it purchased were installed on the premises of one of its customers.

INTRODUCTION CONT… The revenues of Infosys grew steadily to reach Rs 10.3 million by 1985, Rs 19.1 million by 1987 and Rs 25.4 million by 1989

However, the company faced several problems mainly due to restrictions imposed by the government on foreign trade.

Some of the founders were of theopinion that these restrictions were hampering the company's growth tremendously - so much sothat they even contemplated dissolving the company. But Murthy persisted and promised to takethe company to greater heights within five years.

Till 1990, Infosys experienced moderate growth. The company began togrow at a significant pace after the liberalization of the Indian economy in 199 1. The company'srevenues grew from Rs. 55 million in 1991 to Rs. 145.2 million in 1993. In the early nineties,Infosys realized that in order to sustain growth in the future, personnel with generic analyticalskills and high learning ability were needed. Infosys decided to recruit such personnel and thentrain them in specific job skills.

Towards this end, lnfosys established its in-house Education and Research Department (E&RD) in 1991.

The main objective of the department was to provide high quality education and integrate it with career growth, to conduct research which would be of use to the company and evaluate new technologies and tools.

Research Department (E&RD)

In 1992, the E&RD encouraged lnfosys employees to provide written documents about theirexperiences on the job, their learning on various topics relating to software development and use of new technologies etc. Such information formed a part of what was called the Body of Knowledge (BoK). The BoK was updated regularly by the E&RD.

The Body of Knowledge (BoK).

Print copies of BoK were shared among theemployees. The BoK was the first step taken by lnfosys to bring together the knowledge gainedby employees as a part of their day-to-day work.

The E&RD was organized into four groups - Programming Languages & Methodologies,Operating Systems & Networking, Database Management & Transaction Processing, andSoftware Engineering. This organization facilitated consolidation of knowledge and building of expertise.

By 1995, the E&RD developed around 40 courses and had 12 faculty members.

They handled about seven batches of fresh trainee , with each batch comprising of 30 to 120 trainees.

The department also organized some 30 short-term courses for Infosys employees every year.

By 1996, lnfosys was rapidly globalizing its operations.

Every year more than 1000 new employees were joining the company.

The E&RD had over 50 employees and due to greater training needs, instructor-led training was becoming difficult and the department was incurring higher costs.

In mid-1996, the scope of the BoK had increased with the introduction of a web based BoK.

Using the web-based BoK, the employees could submit their contributions and search for required information using the intranet.

The information in the BoK submitted by the employees included their own learning, as well as management issues, methodology and cultural issues.

The web-based BoK,

In 1996, lnfosys launched Sparsh, a corporate intranet. This enabled easy access to the BoKs and other information to the employees.

The other contents of Sparsh included virtual classroom, email, technical bulletin boards etc

Sparsh

Till late 1996, the contributions to the BoK were very few as only a few employees came forward to share their knowledge.

Then, the E&RD went in for an aggressive campaign through electronic bulletin boards and internal promotion.

It also announced rewards for the best write-ups by employees..

Still, only a few employees had the ability to write down their experiences and contribute to the BoK. By 1997, every month the BoK received about ten entries and total contributions to the BoK stood at 400

However, still there was lot of information that needed to be shared within the organization.

In order to facilitate this sharing, a 'Process Assets' system was developed

'Process Assets This system captured the data filled in by project leaders after completion of any project.

The information included a brief description of the project, the target audience etc.

The project managers could also add in additional information. This information was made available to all employees.

Technology based learning

As the number of employees in lnfosys was increasing so were the training needs.

In order to address this issue, technology-based learning was integrated with regular classroom learning.

This helped to reduce the duration of classroom sessions.

THE LAUNCH OF KSHOP In order to maximize value and maintain cost leadership in a highly competitive scenario, it was necessary for lnfosys to use knowledge diligently.

The company felt that knowledge dissemination should be carried out through a central system in order to maintain uniformity.

These factors led to the introduction of Kshop,

The Kshop was started in a small way on five PCs which also acted as servers. Taking the feedback from the employees, the KM group made several changes to Kshop..

Kshop had four pillars - people, content, process and technology. The four pillars facilitated creation, transfer and reuse of knowledge.

Through Kshop, the scope of BoK whose creation and use was limited to one project was expanded to encompass the entire organization.

FOUR DIMENSIONS OF KSHOP REPOSITORY

Knowledge AreaT he Nature of KnowledgeTarget AudienceSource of Knowledge:

The business units, where all the developmental activity was carried out, did not have time to organize knowledge pertaining to a particular domain or a particular technology.

To address this issue, Infosys created two consulting groups to capture and spread knowledge. The two groups were:1. Domain Competency Group

(DCG) 2. Software Engineering &

Technology Laboratories (SETL).

DCG & SETLThe topics covered

by the DCG were industry dynamics & trends, key players, regulatory practices, accounting practices, etc

The focus of SETL was on technology competency and technology architecture and framework.

Knowledge Currency Units (KCUs)

In order to encourage employees to use and contribute to Kshop, the KM group introduced Knowledge Currency Units (KCUs) in 2001.

All the employees of lnfosys who contributed or reviewed the content of Kshop accumulated KCUs. They could convert KCUs into rewards.

Kshop also had a scoreboard of KCUs, which displayed the amount of KCUs accumulated by each of the employees.

With the introduction of KCUs, employees were motivated to submit content to Kshop.

Within one year of the introduction of KCUs, more than 2400 knowledge assets in the form of project proposals, case studies, reusable code, etc were contributed

IMPROVING THE FUNCTIONS OF KSHOP

One of the problem to the success of the KCUs was information overload. This made it difficult for employees to obtain the required information. This sent them back to their informal networks to retrieve the documents quickly. The reviewers were also too few and they were heavily burdened with the increase in content to be reviewed.

It was also felt that knowledge sharing had become a means to earn money and so employees had stopped exchangingknowledge informally.

Some of the project groups were not ready to share their knowledge The KM group realized that KM required cultural and social change within the organization and that superior technology was not enough.

This made the KM group modify the KCU scheme in April 2002.

The new scheme emphasized knowledge sharing and visibility rather than monetary rewards.

Under the new scheme, a composite KCU score was introduced; this took into consideration usefulness and benefit of the contributed content.

The contributions were now rated not only by the volunteers and reviewers, but also by the actual users.

In order to obtain contributions from project teams which were important for the KM efforts, the KM team introduced automated tools, by modifying the forms and templates.

Another effort started by the KM Group was to identify knowledge champions, who were responsible for facilitating knowledge sharing and reuse.

After these changes, the number of quality contributions to Kshop increased, while the totalnumber of contributions reduced by 37% after the introduction of the new scheme. After the initial decline, the number of contributions stabilized.

The reviewers could spend enough time on the contributions and the quality and utility of the knowledge assets increased.

By 2003, there were around 6,000 knowledge documents in Kshop and two documents were being downloaded every working minute.

While recruiting new employees, Infosys paid great attention to the learning ability of the candidate.

As of 2003, there was a central KM group, which was responsible for internal publicity of KM efforts. The group was also responsible for identifying 'KM practice champions' among the employees.

The practice champions helped the KM group to further strengthen the KM efforts in the organization.

KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND SHARING

KM processes at Infosys operated at three levels :

Project level, Customer level Organizational level.

Each project team in Infosys was responsible for designing, developing, testing and implementing the project.

During the process, a lot of knowledge was generated and exchanged within the project team.

Another source of knowledge was the weekly activity report (WAR). The report had details of all the tasks that an employee carried out during the week, on an hourly basis.

Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a set of instructions followed by an organization to gain control over software development process.

CMM consisted of five levels, with each level having steps that allowed the company to acquire knowledge and move from one level to another. As the company moved from one step to the next, further improvement was reflected.

For implementing CMM, Infosys used a mechanism through which the project teams could learn from completed projects.

After completion of the project, the members of the project team were asked to identify what was right and what went wrong during the project.

The closure reports not only created knowledge but also served as a key mechanism to link knowledge creation and deployment at the work group level with the rest of the organization.

At the end of the project, a closure report containing important details about the project, duration, resources and corrective actions was written.

ConclusionAccording to an internal survey in Infosys. the projects managers believed that the performance of their team, including quality of work and productivity improved as a result of KM systems, knowledge sharing practices helped deliver definite benefits to customers, Employees said that they saved a considerable amount of time by using the existing knowledge architecture, the employees were of the opinion that KM was essential for the company to remain competitive. KM was considered important for upper, middle and lower level in the Organization

Q1. Why do you think the knowledge management system at Infosys faced such serious implementation challenges? Defend your answer with examples from the case.

When we dole out monetary incentives to promote any scheme, it leads to un planned and uncontrolled growth leading to management problems. This sometimes leads to inefficiency and dilution in quality ultimately resulting in loss of credibility.

CONT…. The KM group of Infosys first thought that by promoting the Kshop with Knowledge Currency Units (KCU), which could be accumulated and exchanged for monetary rewards, would increase the knowledge sharing on the portal.

But this led to over contribution which resulted in employees experiencing information overload and consequently , higher search costs for reusable knowledge. Secondly, the explosive growth in the no. of contributions began to place a heavy burden on the limited number of volunteer reviewers.

This lead to a lax in the quality control of the shared knowledge, which resulted in knowledge degradation.

Also when questionable articles began to be rated consistently higher, the credibility of the rating system itself came into question.

There was also a fear that one of the core values of the organization involvingthe company’s asking culture would deteriorate.

Q2. What steps did the KM group at Infosys take to improve participation in the KM system? Why were some of these initiatives counterproductive? The KM group responded with corrective initiatives. Do you think these will succeed? Why or why not?

To increase participation in the KM system, the KM group at Infosys introduced “the knowledge currency unit (KCU)” incentive.

According to the scheme, the employees who contributed or reviewed contributions to KShop would be awarded KCUs which employees could accumulate and exchange for monetary rewards and prizes.

Also to motivate the employees, their cumulative KCUs were displayed on a scoreboard on KShop which increased their visibility and hence their standing in the organization.

This served to be counterproductive as an extremely large number of employees started contributing material due to the monetary gain which got published irrespective of its quality thus leading to higher search costs and deplorable quality.

The most important of corrective actions was to distance the knowledge sharing from the monetary incentives to protect the spirit of community in the company by reducing the number of KCUs awarded for reviewing contributions and increasing the minimum standard for cashing the KCU points.

They re evaluated the KCU score so that the contributions were reviewed not only by volunteer reviewers and colleagues, but also by the end users.

They also began to demand tangible proofs for any high ratings to increase the accountability of the reviewers. These initiatives would work as this would lead to contributions and reviews by only serious employees who genuinely wanted to share knowledge.

Second set of corrective actions focused on improving the knowledge management practices within project teams and practice communities.

These initiatives would work as they enabled the codification and extraction of knowledge automatically and without much effort, even as the teams carried out their project related tasks.

Q3. What change management initiatives should the KM group have initiated at Infosys before attempting to develop and  implement knowledge management at the company?

The most prominent cause for the unsuccessful implementation was that the employees were unprepared and unaware of the new system of sharing knowledge. Change management initiatives that the KM group should have initiated can be:1) Educating employees about the system, how

it would work and its benefits

2) Workshops by experts in the knowledge management field

3) Case studies and discussing examples of companies where this system had been successfully implemented and how it had improved its projects efficiencies