Indian knowledge management market to grow at 75%

BANGALORE: The Knowledge Management market in India, which was at Rs 27.7 crore in 2001-02, is expected to grow five-fold to Rs 152.7 crore by 2004-05, at a CAGR of 75.6 per cent. According to IDC, at present, the market in India is in a nascent stage and is limited to only select verticals like banking, finance, consumer goods, dotcoms and IT service companies, according to IDC India.

The composition of two major component, viz products and services is also expected to undergo a reversal during the forecasted period. Currently, the product comprises of 35 per cent, which is expected to increase to 50 per cent in 2004-05.

From the supplier side, the KM market is characterized by a number of specific offerings from various types of local and global products and services companies. Currently, most of the companies are offering solutions around a particular business problem in various types of enterprises.

"The opportunity lies in the areas of planning and consulting activities as well as implementing point solutions around business needs. The market is expected to grow more in financial services, manufacturing, telecom and professional services organizations," said IDC India, head —software and services, Kapil Dev Singh.

These findings are part of a recently conducted study by IDC on the knowledge management software and related services market in India titled "Knowledge Management — Scope in India." The study also indicates that a large number of Indian enterprises have finished with their ERP deployment and now are in a process of deploying SCM and CRM and hence becoming mature in terms of their processes and workflow.

The findings of IDC study also throws light on the major accelerators and inhibitors for the KM market in India. The major accelerators being maturity of select vertical segment in terms of IT adoption and growing realization of the benefits of managing knowledge assets for competitive advantage.

However, lack of understanding of ‘what is KM’ and its benefits are a major inhibitor. Other factors that restricts are issues related to change management, lack of incentive for sharing information, security of the intellectual capital and high cost of software and services.

The study also analyzed the Indian enterprise on the people front and found out that the user for the KM solutions were not very eager to adopt KM system till recently. This is because most people do not believe in sharing the knowledge they possess.

However, the mindset of the people is gradually changing and knowledge management as a concept is slowly gaining momentum in India with select segments of the market moving towards the planning phase.