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The power of knowledge management - A case study

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CIOL Bureau
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When Benjamin Franklin said 'An investment in knowledge pays the best interest', it couldn't have been truer for enterprises wishy-washy about any investment in this strained economy. Companies besieged with many uncertainties face yet another in the form of a deluge of disparate and unstructured data. And precisely this is where an investment in knowledge management systems plays a critical role in aiding enterprises to leverage the vast expanse of data and convert them into 'knowledge assets'.



Easier said than done. We discuss here one such venture by a leading software and services company and its endeavors in successful implementation. MphasiS is one leading software and services providers in India with a presence spanning across the globe. It specializes in the area of application management, legacy systems transformation, enterprise application integration and high-end architecture.






MphasiS, with an employee strength of over 1,400 spread across three company sites and a number of onsite locations, obviously faced the challenges of knowledge sharing and collaboration. Says COO and chairman Jerry Rao, "The team had to grapple with several challenges and the most critical was that of the universal problem of disparate knowledge existing in numerous forms and several locations."





Imposing task: islands of information




Explaining the challenges, he says, "The company's operating business model is a combination of onsite and offshore work. Its onsite team is the first point of contact for the customer. This team understands and identifies the requirements and presents the customer with potential solutions. These solutions are created in conjunction with the offshore team that is involved in development work across three locations in here in India."



And, he continued, "These kind of works done are highly knowledge intensive with all the teams involved required to share briefs, technical information, project details and more. Teams also need to coordinate work, collaborate, and share expertise and best practice. All the applications and documents were created using a variety of software and systems. Also there was no central repository or indexing system, and employees had to spend a great deal of time trying to locate relevant information."



Moreover collaborations were usually time consuming and were expensive. Besides, the information sought were in the web of data that were nearly impossible to locate or use. According to Rao, "With so much experience on varied projects and customers, we had a lot of tacit and latent information, which needed to be published and shared. We realized that we were spending a lot of time and effort in reinventing the wheel."



Evolving a solution







Being a technology company themselves and well versed with the Microsoft technologies, MphasiS finally zeroed in on to implement Microsoft's SharePoint portal server technology. And that's how MphasiS Interactive Knowledge Exchange (MIKE) was born. And the massive project involving gathering all the knowledge of a company took about a merely six people to implement and was completed in under three months.

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Why Microsoft SharePoint Portal server?



The team comprised of project managers, technical heads / partners and key driver was the US-based MphasiS, President and COO, Jeroen Tas. After the successful pilot test of MIKE by the implementation team, and today it just requires few people to manage. Says Rao, "We chose Microsoft SharePoint portal Server 2001 over alternatives because it was easy to use and quick to implement. The implementation was literally out of the box. MIKE was envisaged as the enabler for knowledge creation and sharing that could help us work better as a team."







Implementing Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server has made it easy to access information contained in a wide variety of sources. It has also helped facilitate the creation, maintenance and delivery of information. However, one of the most notable benefit is that it has enabled the organisation to transform static information dynamic thus initiating discussion, collaboration and training over the Internet. The company officials says that the solution was created in under three months by a team of six.

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Technology Deployed



Microsoft technologies used:

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  • SharePoint Portal Server


  • SharePoint Team Services


  • Exchange 2000 Collaboration Services


  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server

SharePoint Portal Server has provided an almost out of the box solution to MphasiS problem, bringing together disparate information from scattered locations and enabling access using an easy interface. Microsoft (India) Marketing Manager Pankaj Ukey explains, "Microsoft's SharePoint Portal server essential components include:



  1. Versioning


  2. Meta Data Tagging


  3. Dash board feature-i.e., digital version of user interface.
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    Essentially these features provide for a powerful search services along with the required tag to reflect the latest version of any document searched and facilitates the capture, publishing and reuse of documents in any format.. For example, if somebody wants to search, say on wireless protocol, the versioning features returns with one of the latest documented project on the topic. The user interface allows one to customize any application to their individual preferences and priority. He says, this solution is browser independent and device independent and allow accessibility from any point.



    MphasiS also took advantage of its underlying Windows 2000 Active Directory implementation to cut down deployment and management issues SharePoint is also specially designed to work with Microsoft Office applications, the Windows family of operating systems and the Internet Explorer Web browser.



    "We needed a solution that would allow knowledge workers to collaborate and share information, while allowing us the flexibility to set parameters and define the objectives for the exchange if required", says Rao.



    Says Pankaj, " We were only the technology providers and provided the design to the team. But the rest of the implementation were done entirely by the MphasiS team and we were directly involved only in the pilot phase of the MIKE testing". With SharePoint Portal Server, secure access to content and a powerful search engine are also part of the package.



    As part of its MIKE framework, MphasiS uses Sharepoint Team Services for sharing information and collaborating across different members of a project team/community. Access can easily be configured so that only people who are part of the project have access to the team rooms. Access is provided to the clients as well; so that they know exactly what state their project is in at any point in time. Collaboration between the various team members and the client is facilitated through instant messaging, discussion forums as well as online data conferencing with includes such features as chat, white boarding, file transfer and application sharing thus facilitating the Virtual Team Model that MphasiS operates on.



    Advantage and RoI



    • Cost efficiency and Reduced time-to-market:

    MphasiS was able to increase cost efficiencies and reduced time to market essentially due to:



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    1. the reduction in communication costs, and savings in time.


    2. By facilitating best practice sharing, the company is able to utilise resources more efficiently and also save time on each project.


    3. Customer acquisition improved dramatically powered by reduced timeframes to respond to queries and Requests for Proposals (RFPs).


    4. Availability of Case Studies, write-ups on company strengths such as Quality Processes, Security, Infrastructure etc, shortened the time required to frame responses to RFPs.


    5. Also, the 'Versioning' facility of SharePoint greatly enhanced collaborative working on a document.


    6. What took MphasiS 15 days to respond to on an average, nine months ago, now take the company just five days, thanks to the 'knowledge repository'.




    7. "SharePoint Portal Server in conjunction with Sharepoint Team Services provides an extremely economical solution with minimal skills retraining. We felt this was a 'must have' killer application. For a virtual team model, we honestly could not think of a better alternative", says an ecstatic Rao.



      • Enhanced customer satisfaction and increased bottomline

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      "SharePoint Portal Server truly benefited the MphasiS bottom line. It helped us do our job better, adding to client satisfaction and retention. It helped us run our business more efficiently while creating new business opportunities for the company." opined Jeroen Tas.



      Targeting customers with relevant credentials has become simpler and less time consuming for the time-starved sales force. In just a few hours (as compared to a week earlier) one of the several company credentials in the MIKE repository can be tailored to suit the targeted prospect improving the acquisition rate significantly.



      • Knowledge on tap

      Another feature is that the SharePoint Portal Server web site can be accessed any time from any computer with an Internet browser, allowing anytime anywhere access to users. Leveraging the versioning features of SPS 2001 and the data conferencing component of Exchange for application sharing, team members can access, discuss and work on all types of documents at any time they want



      • Minimal training and change management

      Since SharePoint Portal Server has the same friendly user interface, familiar to all Microsoft Office users, retraining the staff was minimal and was easily adapted. Additionally, MphasiS used the Data Conferencing feature of Exchange 2000 Conferencing Sever to share applications and conduct user training.



      "With SharePoint we built on our existing infrastructure and boosted efficiency in cost, time and people terms. It was like growing without the growing pains!" sums up Rao.

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