KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AT INFOSYS

Knowledge Management at Infosys

Knowledge Management at Infosys

Introduction

Times are changing. A company is no longer valued on just its physical assets and income streams. Today, there is a new kind of asset being valued in our economy. That asset is knowledge, the intellectual capital of the organization. The high potential return of leveraging the knowledge capital of an organization has led to company valuations that far exceed what used to be accepted as standard. This new capital is walking around your company, is hidden in file drawers, and surfaces in conversations with clients and suppliers.

There're three kinds of knowledge capital in every organization, namely human, structural, and relationship. Anantatmula (2006) believes that people can use their competence to create value in two directions: by transferring and converting knowledge externally or internally to the organization they belong to. When the managers of a firm direct the efforts of their employees internally, they create tangible goods and intangible structures such as better processes and new designs for products. When they direct their attention outwards, in addition to delivery of goods and money they also create intangible structures, such as customer relationships, brand awareness, reputation and new experiences for the customers. (Anantatmula, 2006) in this paper we analysed Knowledge Management at Infosys.

Infosys Knowledge Management

Infosys provides consultancy and software services worldwide to Fortune 500 companies. It employs approximately 10,200 employees and executes nearly 1,000 software projects at any given point in time in diverse areas such as telecom, manufacturing, insurance, finance, and so forth. Needless to say, managing knowledge at Infosys is a huge challenge.

Until late 2000, Infosys restricted KM to certain pockets within the company. Then, it began a KM initiative with a steering committee that had representation from the Board of Directors and senior management. Currently, there are approximately eight full-time people designated as brand managers who help build and maintain the KM infrastructure. A central pool created for this purpose funds the majority of the KM costs.(Gehring, 2007) However, for project-level KM, the software project bears the cost—typically 2 to 3 percent of the total cost.

Infosys manages organization-wide knowledge using three centrally operated knowledge repositories: the Knowledge Shop (K-Shop), Process Asset Database, and People Knowledge Map.

Infosys built the K-Shop architecture on Microsoft site server technology, and all employees can access it through a Web interface. The company encourages people to submit papers related to technology, domain, trends, culture, project experiences, internal or external literature, and so forth. They can submit the articles in any format that the Web supports (for example, HTML or Word), and we designed templates for various content types to ensure uniformity. In addition, the K-Shop has an excellent search facility that offers search through multiple parameters. K-Shop documents are available to all Infosys employees and are segregated based on the user's selected keywords and content type.(Martin, 2000)

As mentioned earlier, we need more than one system or mechanism for KM. Infosys's intranet portal Sparsh serves as the window for all systems and acts as ...