PUNE: A new effort to capture the vast amount of knowledge stored within the
organization is on at Zensar Technologies Ltd. The company has rolled out its
Knowledge Management System, K-Zen: a major initiative from the company as it
transforms itself into a dynamic learning organization, using its intellectual
capital for ensuring customer satisfaction and growth.
K-Zen attempts to retain and sharpen Zensar's competitive edge in the
changing business environment. It is an effort to capture the vast amount of
knowledge stored within Zensar - the minds of its 1000 employees, computer
networks and other documents spread across 23 geographic locations in 5
continents, and convert it into competitive value for the organization.
K-Zen is capturing the intellectual capital of the organization, which
includes technologies mastered, processes nurtured, markets serviced, and the
people groomed and grown. The aim is to make this repository an active agent in
the company's growth plans by reducing costs, increasing productivity and
improving services and products. The system would effectively deploy the
experience gained from best practices across the organization in customer
engagements and projects across markets and geographies.
According to Ganesh Natarajan, deputy chairman and managing director, Zensar
Technologies Ltd., who spoke on Knowledge Management at the IT-BT conference
organized by Pune Vyaspeeth and Cyber Expo Ltd., knowledge management is
increasingly on the minds of senior executives across the world. Good knowledge
management should be able to know how to take knowledge and convert it into
useful information.
A pilot Knowledge Management System has already been implemented within
Zensar's Cisco Offshore Development Centre. The pilot system, unveiled on the
company intranet, is driving the Knowledge Management culture across the
organization. The system includes global access from anywhere in the world,
multiple levels of access controls, comprehensive cross functional search,
authentication and validation of data, architecture to support scalability in
size and modularity in content and site administration and usage analysis.
While technology does play a major role, the crucial challenge is in
popularizing the shared culture of learning within the organization. Zensar is
doing this through a multi-pronged strategy: workshops, seminars and training
sessions. Moreover, quality audits inside have made it mandatory for every
project to capture and document its learning. Knowledge sharing is also linked
to the Performance Management System.
As a result, in a very short time K-Zen has 800 users logged on to avail the
benefits of 1000 knowledge objects.
The K-Zen team is working on a tight schedule to implement the entire system.
Once completed, K-Zen will be a single intranet based system, seamlessly
integrating all Zensar's interfaces, from vendors and employees right to the
customers.
Through this Knowledge Management System, Zensar will be able to bring the
project delivery cycle time, with cost savings for the customer. It will also
pave the way for better customer partnerships through shared access to best
practices documented on the intranet. Cisco, in whose ODC the pilot project is
implemented, is already functioning in a shared team space with Zensar, where it
can access the entire documentation for various applications.
Natarajan said that the company has instituted an award for employees to
contribute the maximum knowledge nuggets. The award will be given at the end of
December.