'KM at Infosys enjoys a considerable following'

What are the best practices that Infy follows in KM?

After a critical mass of people is brought into the fold of
KM, its practices usually germinate and develop in different ways. At Infosys,
an evolutionary strategy has therefore been adapted to formally, and
continually, address the four basic dimensions of KM, viz., people, process,
technology and knowledge, and set up a scalable KM architecture capable of
catering to differing intents and changing requirements over time. This strategy
has helped us provide scalable and robust KM systems with high availability and
avoid the pitfalls of technologically (or otherwise) constrained KM
implementations, which often lead to the failure of KM in organizations.

People being a critical dimension of KM, a facilitative decentralised people
architecture — using the principle of non-intrusion and alignment with
prevalent work culture and systems - has been designed to aid the creation and
dissemination of knowledge across the organisation.



Correspondingly, a multi-layered KM process architecture has been designed to
enable easy submission, review and publication of knowledge artifacts. It
seamlessly adds light weight process elements to facilitate their use, collation
and analysis of metrics related to usage, utility, quality and relevance of the
artifacts, and their collective impact on the quality and productivity of the
deliverables of different functions within the organization.



How has it helped the company to be different from the rest? Is there any
industry standard for KM?

An innovative incentive scheme, based on a proprietary and novel points
system, referred to as the Knowledge Currency Units (KCUs), supports and
promotes the KM processes, by providing various forms of rewards and recognition
to the activity of knowledge sharing in the company. The knowledge architecture
is founded on an easy and intuitive classification system (based on a four-level
proprietary taxonomy) for artifacts, and a retrieval scheme designed to bring
out the most relevant and valued content corresponding to the context of the
seeker of the content.



Collaborative exchanges and content in repositories complement each other in
providing knowledge artifacts to users, and this is further supplemented through
the provision of condensed feeds from various data stores across the
organization, presently being progressively integrated with the central
knowledge portal.



The technology architecture has been designed to enable the development of a
scalable, secure, flexible and available KM infrastructure to promote knowledge
exchange, by providing a single-system view of organizational experiences and
learning through the collaborative and content management components of the
central knowledge portal. Designed to avoid a demand for numerous changes in
employee work culture to accommodate knowledge exchange practices, the
technology infrastructure has been built to conform to the specific ways in
which people interact, use systems and exchange knowledge across the
organization.

Each of these elements have distinguished the practice of KM
at Infosys from those of others in a significant way, leading to a leadership
status being accorded to our KM practice. Presently, there are no commonly
accepted standards for KM.

What percentage of the workforce will be dedicated to KM
team?

At Infosys, we have a small dedicated, central team to
facilitate KM activities across the organization. The central team provides and
maintains the technology and process infrastructures which enable contribution
from, and usage by, employees, determines the nature and scope of KM specific
interventions into the company’s business processes and supervises activities
associated with content management, collaboration, enterprise system integration
and branding, promotion and incenting.

In addition to the central team, a network of KM champions,
associates and primes — light-weight roles selected from the practices across
development centers and IBUs — assist the activities in their respective
domains.



What kind of documentation do you carry out?

As mentioned earlier knowledge exchange — through documents and other types
of content, collaborative platforms and physical interactions based on easy
location of appropriate experts, etc — is primarily carried out by the
knowledge workers through the infrastructure provided by the central KM team.



Thus, contribution of various kinds of knowledge assets and their subsequent use
in similar or different contexts are both the domains of the employees. One of
the roles of the central team — content management — is to manage the
submission, review, publication and incentive management parts of the life cycle
for content that is submitted by employees across the organization to the KM
repository.



In other words, all content — be it experiential documents, case studies,
customer credentials, learning material, collaborative exchanges, and enterprise
system resident information — is contributed by the knowledge workers, while
the central team facilitates their availability across the organization.

The documentation created by the central team is more
concerned with the strategies for KM, research reports, technology tool
development and KM process change recommendations, health and data monitoring of
various systems, and measurements of KM effectiveness in different functions.

Do you share the knowledge outside the company also or is it
for internal purpose?

In the beginning, KM at Infosys was designed exclusively for internal use.
Since knowledge has come to represent an important, and critical, corporate
resource, the knowledge management systems at Infosys are available only for
activities within the company. However, many employees are also members of
different internet communities and discussion groups — knowledge being
seamless, their interactions with people across the world is likely to be
infused with knowledge obtained as part of their work and explorations inside
Infosys. We consciously avoid either policing or constraining these activities
in the organization.

From another standpoint, as a pioneer in the area of KM in
India, Infosys has in many ways been influential in encouraging the development
of KM practices in the country. Given that the macro-economic, social and
cultural milieus, and business challenges, are somewhat similar for most
organizations in India, KM at Infosys enjoys a considerable following among, and
arouses considerable interest in, Indian corporate and academic circles.



While specific KM implementations differ in scope and purport, dozens of
organizations have over time benefited from the experiences of Infosys in this
area in structuring their own KM initiatives.