Knowledge Management In Infosys Technologies

By: Shringarika Agarwal (B-17) Stuti Shrivastava (B-18) Anshu Agarwal (B-20) Nikita Jain (B-33)

Infosys

Limited formally Infosys Technologies is an Indian global technology services company headquartered in Bangalore, India. Infosys is ranked #27 in the list of top companies of India in Fortune India 500 list in 2011. was founded in 1981 by Narayana Murthy,Nandan Nilekani, N. S. Raghavan, S. Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh and Ashok Arora.

Infosys

Infosys KM vision
To be an organizationWhere every action is fully enabled by

the power of knowledge. Which truly believes in leveraging knowledge for innovation. Where every employee is empowered by the knowledge of every other employee. Which is globally respected knowledge leader.

Efforts to manage knowledge at Infosys

Infosys realized that in order to sustain

growth in the future, personnel with generic analytical skills and high learning ability were needed. Towards this end, lnfosys established its inhouse Education and Research Department (E&RD) in 1991. In 1992, the E&RD encouraged lnfosys employees to provide written documents about their experiences on the job, their learning on various topics relating to software development and use . Such information formed a part of what was called the Body of Knowledge (BoK).

The BoK was updated regularly by the

E&RD and the department also contributed extensively to it. Print copies of BoK were shared among the employees. By 1996, lnfosys was rapidly globalizing its operations. Every year more than 1000 new employees were joining the company. In 1996, lnfosys launched Sparsh, a corporate intranet. This enabled easy access to the BoKs and other information to the employees. Soon, Sparsh evolved into a central information portal at Infosys. In order to facilitate this sharing, a 'Process Assets' system was developed.

In

mid 1998, the need for an integrated architecture to support the learning needs of employees was felt.

The new architecture was designed

to make available courses on concepts and technology, experimental knowledge in the organization, learning resources like manuals and journals and details of the projects carried out by employees.

KM Model of Maturity:
The KMM defined five KM Maturity Levels which were : Default Reactive Aware Convinced Sharing According to KMM, the knowledge life cycle had three stages : knowledge acquisition and updation knowledge sharing & dissemination knowledge reuse

Infosys' KMM had three prongs : People Process Technology Higher maturity levels signified higher capabilities of the three prongs.

 THE LAUNCH OF KSHOP

The mission of KM efforts at lnfosys

was 'to ensure that all organizational learning is leveraged in delivering business advantage to the customer'. lnfosys established a KM group with nine employees, in 1999. The main objective of the KM group was to drive a company-wide KM program

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, a knowledge portal launched in the year 2000. The Kshop was started in a small way on five PCs which also acted as servers.Taking the feedback

Kshop had four pillars - people,

content, process and technology. The four pillars facilitated creation, transfer and reuse of knowledge. 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. The scope of Kshop was increased

Types of content in Kshop

Internal K-Assets-

Consisted of industry specific knowledge assets, body of knowledge, project snapshot documents, internal white papers and reports, reusable artifacts, discussion groups and chat sessions and internal FAQs. External K-AssetsIncluded glossary of business and technical terms, technology summaries, online journals.

Four Dimensions of KShop Repository

Knowledge

Area This content was proprietary to Infosys and consisted of details of about 2000 knowledge areas. The nature of knowledge- Case studies, project details, write-ups, publications, white papers, tutorials, etc. Target Audience- The audience at whom the content was targeted, which included project managers, developers, programmers, etc Source of knowledge- The content that was a part of kshop could be from either external source or internal source.

How to encourage employees?

In order to encourage employees

to use and contribute to Kshop, the KM group introduced Knowledge Currency Units (KCUs) in 2001. contributed or reviewed the content of Kshop accumulated KCUs. They could convert KCUs into rewards.

All the employees of lnfosys who

KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND SHARING

Almost all the projects that Infosys

undertook were broken down into onsite and offshore components. KM processes at Infosys operated at three levels - project level, customer level and organizational level. The organization level knowledge sharing was carried out through Kshop. Through Kshop, the knowledge that

Conclusion
Infosys

provides end-to-end workforce collaboration and knowledge management services including Knowledge Management Process Consulting, Collaboration and Knowledge Management Applications, Portals, Content Management, Document Management, Enterprise Application Integration, Security and Workflow. Companys Knowledge Management Services help you assess your needs, evaluate technologies and recommend solutions in the context of your business problems.

 More than 85% of the employees said that

they tried to reuse existing knowledge. The company felt that knowledge dissemination should be carried out through a central system in order to maintain uniformity, hence they developed kshop. Kshop had four pillars - people, content, process and technology. Infosyss Knowledge Management was based on 3 prongs, people, process and technology.