Zensar unveils K-Zen for decisive knowledge advantage

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.