India KM-ready in every sense: Infy

KM, in recent times, has shown speedy acceptance and adoption in various industrial and service sectors across the country. KM already pervades many of the top-notch companies in different areas — consultancy, IT services, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing,etc as it derives better operational efficiencies and turn around time, says Dr J K Suresh, Principal Knowledge Manager, Infosys Technologies in an interview to CIOL.

In recent times many Indian enterprises have shown

interest in KM concept and there is a spurt in utilizing KM concept. Why is it

so?

In India, practices designed to

promote KM — in the new sense the term seems to have acquired in recent years

- have been in place for at least ten to fifteen years, although initially

restricted to new-economy companies to the large part. However, the emphasis on

Knowledge Management (KM) as a formal and focused activity has acquired

increasing organizational impetus and mind-share in other sectors only over the

past five years or so.

More recently, KM has shown reasonably speedy

acceptance and adoption in various industrial and service sectors across the

country. An important factor enabling this development has been the

liberalization of the Indian economy, underway for the past thirteen years or

so. In the decades before this, a regime of strict governmental controls,

licensing and quotas had constrained the Indian industry in its search for

excellence, market share and international presence.






In a fundamental sense, it is the widening exposure to markets and competition
worldwide — also promoted through the growing integration with the global

economy — that has encouraged the Indian industry to focus on deriving

superior operational efficiencies and encouraging organizational innovation, two

important objectives that the area of KM sub-serves.

In addition, several other

imperatives have driven the conviction in Indian organizations that the

effective utilization of their knowledge base is pivotal to success. These

include the constant need to raise the quality of their offerings, raise revenue

productivity in order to sustain cost competitiveness, reduce risk and maintain

a high level of market awareness. Consequently, several practices have evolved

to ensure the effective sharing and (re-)use of knowledge. Innovation being the

central aspect of such enterprises, we are likely to see an acceleration of the

acceptance and adoption of KM practices and ideas in the country as a

consequence.

What do you attribute the trend to?

The need for practicing KM in an

organization is governed by the value proposition in introducing KM, and

influenced by the relative ease of knowledge exchange between the producers and

the consumers of knowledge within the organization. It is this perceived value,

and the success stories of early adopters like Wipro, Cognizant, I-Flex, TCS,

Satyam, which are likely to increase the spread of implementation over time into

hitherto uncharted areas of industry, manufacture, distribution and services.

A primary driver for KM is the

criticality of the need for practicing it in an organization. This is to a

significant extent governed by the ease of knowledge exchange between the

producers and the consumers of knowledge within the organization. If this is not

simple or easy (as for example due to structural complexities in organizations

with geographically distributed functions), KM is likely to be of paramount

importance and vice-versa.






In addition, KM is likely to be highly applicable where products and business
processes are complex, variable or ill defined (e.g., product and service

companies with complex market offerings, consulting organizations, research and

development establishments, large organizations, new ventures, etc), and less so

where they are well defined and relatively static (e.g., automatic assembly—line

manufacturing, largely transactional businesses as in the case of small retail

shops, small organizations, etc).

In this background, it appears

very likely that KM would continue to witness widespread adoption over the

coming years, not only in different industry segments, but also in other areas

of the society, e.g., through communities of practice and other collaborative

mechanisms. Furthermore, as implementation of KM practices in the Indian

industry accelerates, its subtle nuances are likely to emerge with greater

clarity to help address a larger number of variants within industry segments.

Given the growing prowess of India as an IT power, a further impetus is likely

to be provided to this industry as it piggy-backs on IT to evolve comprehensive

end-to-end solutions to customers world-wide.

How KM-ready is the Indian market?



With the increasing commoditization of

traditional competitive differentiators, it is becoming abundantly clear that

the effective use of knowledge is a key factor in ensuring corporate success.

Even if the success story of India as a preferred outsourcing destination may

have been, in the initial years at least, founded on a certain amount of

arbitrage of labor, its continuance and indeed sustenance are undoubtedly linked

to a strong emphasis and premium on innovation and operational efficiencies —

and this is today being widely recognized across most sectors of industry.

The development of KM services in

the country in recent years could be considered an index of the criticality of

the activity. Presently, a good number of vendors provide standard or customized

solutions corporations, small and large. A handful of KM technology products, of

varying degrees of sophistication and scope, developed for the Indian and global

markets have come into the market. A number of major Indian IT services and

product companies have already begun offering consultancy and solutions for KM

and anticipate significant revenue possibilities from these offerings.

In summary, the Indian market is

KM-ready in every sense and the coming months and years are n the future likely

to see an explosion in the KM practices and KM maturity of a great number of

Indian corporations.

How are they leveraging this concept? What kind of

knowledge is documented?

In India, KM is being leveraged

in areas ranging widely, from manufacturing to services. The IT service

companies, as explained earlier, leverage KM to promote learning, re-use,

dissemination, innovation, de-risking and quick turn-around times. The

pharmaceutical sector leverages KM in many phases, ranging from speeding up the

drug discovery process, optimizing drug testing and approval processes, to data

collection and analysis after drug introduction in markets.






Manufacturing companies like Tata Steel, on the other hand, are likely to
leverage KM to derive better operational efficiencies, aid quicker resolution of

problems, integrate complex business processes and promote research and

development activities. Insurance companies are likely to concentrate more on

using KM for building better models for actuarial, risk assessment and claims

processing activities, and also to bring the customers, intermediaries and

insurers together into well knit communities through knowledge exchange.

However, exchange of documented

knowledge, in most cases above, is unlikely to be the only dimension of the

practice of KM in these organizations. Equally significant would be

collaborative platforms, forums and systems created for exchanging the tacit

knowledge resident within the people, as exemplified through discussion groups,

forums and communities of practice.






Furthermore, enterprise information, when presented in various forms through
different systems along with its context in a business process, constitutes

valuable knowledge of use for the organization in different business situations.

It is through these multiple vehicles and processes that KM lives and thrives in

an organization.

How beneficial is the exercise?

In the early years, the practice

of KM seems to have been focused on leveraging its promise to improve the speed

and quality of learning, doing, decision-making and customer service at the

organizational as well as the individual levels; and the promise to reduce

risks, make the organization more robust and help it thrive in a rapidly

changing business environment. This was sought to be achieved by

institutionalizing best practices existing in pockets, enabling and facilitating

greater re-use, and aiding better virtual teamwork; and were essentially

directed towards raising the organization's ability to deliver higher quality

and achieve faster time-to-market. To the large part during this period, though,

the emphasis seems to have been on structuring, integrating and serving

information and knowledge content in an asynchronous manner, with supportive

practices to encourage and increase contribution and (re-)use.

More recently, the emphasis on

collaboration seems to have acquired impetus. The creation and nurturing of

discussion forums, special interest groups, communities, etc in many

organizations is indicative of this. Such efforts offer interesting

possibilities — competence building in a fast-changing technological and

business environment, increased congruence between individual and organizational

purposes, higher levels of business innovation and the evolution of strategic

directions for the conduct as well as the content of business.

Current concerns of KM are

related to understanding RoIs (return on investment), measuring effectiveness,

quantifying business benefits, and arriving at an optimal balance between people

measures, systems, processes and technology components in KM implementations,

etc. These are significantly different concerns from those of the past in the

sense that, given the maturity gained over the previous years, clear

quantification of benefits would have to be established in the quality and

productivity dimensions to propel future investments in, and growth of, KM. It

therefore appears that different stages of KM maturity provides different levels

of benefits for the organizations that practice KM, ranging from operational

excellence to improvements in innovation capabilities and knowledge capital.

What is the trend like among the Indian enterprises? Is it

only the new age companies who have shown interest or companies in the

manufacturing, BFSI and other old economy enterprises are also implementing the

solutions?

In today's business environment,

knowledge has acquired increased velocity - measured both in terms of the rate

of it's creation and obsolescence, and the rate at which it moves around in the

economy; secondly, as products and services become increasingly

"knowledge-based", knowledge has become more fundamental to

establishing competitive advantage; finally, the whole notion of intellectual

property has moved to the centre stage.

In this background, the forces,

which have shaped the development of the new organization in India through the

nineties and till present, continue to provide the concrete basis for KM to

acquire widespread acceptance across industry segments and types. As explained

previously, KM already pervades many of the top-notch companies in different

areas — consultancy, IT services, pharmaceuticals, steel, automobile and

aircraft industries, etc.

Even as organizations

increasingly attempt to — with globalization spurring ever greater competition

— seduce the markets with complex, tailored and innovative products and

services, there would be a corresponding need to acknowledge the centrality of

people and the knowledge capital they create; and, the demands for survival,

sustenance and growth would very likely create tremendous opportunities for

Indian companies to not only adopt KM widely, but also leverage their knowledge

capital in ways beyond what we witness today.