The primary driver for Infosys' knowledge management strategy is that, as the company climbs the value curve, it increasingly needs mechanisms for speedy and efficient consolidation of expertise. The turbulent scenario of the e-business era, with its premium on speed, agility, and competitive intensity, has given a further fill to this need.

The mission is to ensure that all organizational learning is leveraged in delivering business advantage to the customer and that Infosys staffs in contact with the customer have the collective knowledge of the organization behind them. The Infosys KM strategy is described in greater below:

Existing Initiatives

A number of initiatives related to knowledge dissemination, sharing, and reuse have been happening in a decentralized way for quite some time now. Although most of these have been in place since before the term 'Knowledge Management' was coined, they can retrospectively be categorized as KM-related.

The company maintains a Body of Knowledge (BoK) on the intranet, which enshrines experiential learning gained by past projects. Entries are contributed by Infosys staffs and a review mechanism screens them from content, applicability, presentation, and aspects. Several projects- and PU (Practice Unit) - specific BoKs also exist. Since only a small proportion of employees will distill and write up experiences, a 'Process Assets' system has also been developed to capture the 'as-is' project deliverables into an intranet-based repository.

Given the knowledge-intensive nature of Infosys' business, a clear understanding of its knowledge capital is essential, but cannot be obtained via traditional financial statements. Infosys has adopted various models for evaluating its intangible assets and disclosing them in its financial reports.

A Knowledge Directory, providing pointers to the expertise available within the organization, has been developed and deployed. Known as the People­ Knowledge-Map (PKM), it provides an intranet-based interface via which people can register or locate expertise. The system is driven off a proprietary knowledge hierarchy that has been created, which consists of a multi-level taxonomy of topics that represent knowledge in Infosys context. The hierarchy consists of about 1000 knowledge nodes, with the top-level being technology, process, project management, application domain and culture, and deeper levels representing a fiber grain of topics.

A web-based virtual classroom has been developed and deployed on the intranet and allows access to various courses whose content has also been developed internally. This system incorporates a discussion forum where participants can post and respond to course-related queries. In addition, several online tutorials have also been purchased and deployed over the intranet.

The company-wide intranet, Christened Sparsh, consists of about 5000 nodes spread throughout the various India-based development centers (DCs), and the US-based marketing offices.

Practices that have worked are also propagated through regular seminars and best-practice sessions, held both within units and organization-wide.

An integrated KM strategy

A move towards an integrated KM strategy was initiated in 1999, and a coherent KM effort is now underway. Infosys' KM strategy revolves around the key constituents of People, Process, and Technology. It aims to address the various challenges underpinned by Infosys' proprietary KMM (Knowledge Management Maturity) model. The KMM model draws significantly from the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). It has a two-fold purpose -to provide a framework, which can be used to assess the current level of KM maturity, and to act as a mechanism to focus and help prioritize efforts to raise the level of KM maturity.

In analogy with the CMM, the KMM model consists of 5 maturity levels, with a set of Key Result Areas (KRAs) defined at each level. Each KRA defines a particular capability in terms of people, process or technology, and effectively serves as a unit of KM capability.

The Content Architecture

Content Architecture has been defined for knowledge assets, and consists of a set of defined types. Internal content represents Infosys' internal expertise, such as BoK, project snapshot documents that provide a window into projects, internal white papers, reusable code and others artifacts, discussion groups, chat sessions, etc. External content represents expertise existing outside Infosys, including reviewed websites, glossaries of business and technology terms, technology summaries, online journals and books, external white papers, technology and business news, etc. Each item in the content repository will be associated with one or more nodes in the knowledge hierarchy to facilitate ease of submission and retrieval. The flow of content into the KM repositories has been charted and envisages different stages such as review by identified internal experts, streamlining and editing, publishing, certification and maintenance.

The technology architecture

A central KM portal is under development that will provide access to knowledge assets as defined by the content architecture. The recommended means of navigation will be via the knowledge hierarchy- a visual depiction of the hierarchy will facilitate this.

The long-term technology vision for KM is that all web sites containing knowledge assets, whether belonging to different competency groups within the organization, to projects or to individuals, will mirror the central KM architecture, to facilitate integrated access to users.

The People Architecture

KM implementation needs the right balance between functions that will be managed by a central group and those that will be performed in a decentralized way. Infosys has chosen a 'facilitated approach', which envisages the following: the technology architecture management will be done by a central KM group and all stages of the content management process will be anchored by it - creation of internal content however must happen in practice, and will be facilitated by the KM group. In addition. The strategy envisages logical ownership of content by different competency groups/individuals, at appropriate nodes in the knowledge hierarchy.

Making it happen

A slew of measures to promote and publicize the KM initiative internally are on the anvil- this includes a combination of hard, performance correlated incentives and soft, peer recognition-based measures. The creation of Knowledge Currency Units (KCUs), which people can earn for contribution towards knowledge sharing, is one example. A KCU scoreboard on the central KM portal will give high visibility to strong contributors. The aim is to establish a strong, visible correlation between attaining a high profile in the organization and contribution to KM.

'Knowledge summits' are planned every quarter, where knowledge sharing will be highlighted and contributors felicitated. One of the important tenets of facilitating knowledge sharing is to minimize the overhead of doing so; hence, quality processes are being relocked at for possible modifications that will ensure contribution to knowledge sharing.

Top management involvement is valuable in ensuring success of Infosys' fledgling KM effort. A steering committee oversees the initiative, and has representation from members of senior management representing various key functions. Various high-level strategies and planning fora also have sessions devoted to KM.

Challenges for the future

The Infosys KM effort has come out of infancy, but is hardly past adolescence. Major inroads are being made on the 'hard' front of putting systems in place. However, there is still a long way to go on the 'soft' front - ensuring large-scale awareness and usage of the systems by all quarters within the organization for business leverage.

An important future objective includes giving the customer direct benefits from the KM effort plans to make this happen include an extranet that will expose internal knowledge, suitably screened for IPR issues, to select Infosys customers.

Case Study Questions:

QUESTION 1

Relate the steps KM group at Infosys took to improve participation in the KM system. [3 Marks]

QUESTION 2

Evaluate why were some of these initiatives counterproductive. [7 Marks]

QUESTION 3

The KM group responded with corrective initiatives. Do you think these will succeed? Justify your answer. [10 Marks]

QUESTION 4

Propose the change management initiatives that the KM group at Infosys should have initiated before attempting to develop and implement knowledge management at the company. [10 Marks]