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Infosys Tech Case Study

This document summarizes knowledge management practices at Infosys, a leading Indian software company. It discusses how Infosys established knowledge repositories like the Knowledge Shop, Process Asset Database, and People Knowledge Map to centrally manage organizational knowledge. At the project level, knowledge is managed through project-specific websites and repositories. Infosys incentivizes knowledge sharing and reuse through a knowledge currency unit system that rewards employees financially for contributing and utilizing knowledge assets. Through these knowledge management initiatives, Infosys has increased productivity, reduced defects by up to 40%, and improved overall business performance.

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407 views

Infosys Tech Case Study

This document summarizes knowledge management practices at Infosys, a leading Indian software company. It discusses how Infosys established knowledge repositories like the Knowledge Shop, Process Asset Database, and People Knowledge Map to centrally manage organizational knowledge. At the project level, knowledge is managed through project-specific websites and repositories. Infosys incentivizes knowledge sharing and reuse through a knowledge currency unit system that rewards employees financially for contributing and utilizing knowledge assets. Through these knowledge management initiatives, Infosys has increased productivity, reduced defects by up to 40%, and improved overall business performance.

Uploaded by

Annonymous963258
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Knowledge Management at Infosys

Submitted by

Abhilash.R.Krishna & Sajish V.S


MBA (IB)
SMS, CUSAT
30/10/2009
Introduction

The case presents the knowledge management (KM) practices of Infosys Technologies, one of
the leading software companies based in India. Infosys was inducted into the Global Most Admired
Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Hall of Fame in the year 2005 due to its innovative KM initiatives. Since
its inception, Infosys gave importance to learning in the organization. Its efforts to assimilate and
distribute knowledge within the company began with the establishment of Education and Research
Department in the year 1991. The department began gathering content and knowledge that was
available within the organization and the scope of the department grew with the launch of intranet
Scenarios such as this are common across software companies worldwide. Knowledge workers
alone can’t sufficiently gather and distribute knowledge. Organizations require an infrastructure to
support such workers and an information flow that enables knowledge dissemination. If you look at
typical software scenarios, there is a greater percentage of knowledge workers than so-called hand
workers. Knowledge workers spend some time doing hand work (typing, writing email, and so forth), but
this is just to properly format the knowledge. Hence, knowledge management assumes enormous
significance. Here, we review KM practices at Infosys, discussing how to implement KM and revealing
some of its potential benefits.

History Of Infosys
Infosys Technologies is a leading Information Technology (IT) company which provides end-to-
end business solutions that leverage technology. Infosys serves the client globally and as one of the
pioneers in strategic offshore outsourcing of software services, it has leveraged the global trend of
offshore outsourcing. Infosys helps large global corporations and new generation technology companies
in building new products or services and in implementing prudent business and technology strategies in
the contemporary dynamic digital environment.

Infosys was founded on July 2, 1981 by N.R. Narayan Murthy and six of his colleagues, namely,
Nandan Nilekani, N. S. Raghavan, S. Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh and Ashok Arora. Narayan
Murthy borrowed Rs.10,000 from his wife Sudha Murthy as seed capital for the company. In 1987
Infosys got its first foreign client, Data Basics Corporation from the United States and opened its first
office in the USA. In 1993, Infosys became a public limited company and successfully completed IPO in
India. In the same year Infosys received ISO 9001 IT certification. Infosys set up its first office in Europe
in Milton Keynes, UK in 1996. In 1999, Infosys crossed $100 Million in annual revenue and was listed
on NASDAQ. It was Indian company to be listed on NASDAQ. In the same year Infosys opened offices in
Germany, Sweden, Belgium, and Australia. In 2000, Infosys crossed $200 Million in annual revenue. In
2004, Infosys crossed US $1 Billion in annual revenue. In 2006,Infosys completed 25 years of its
existence and its revenues crossed $ 2 billion. Today Infosys has more than 50,000 employees and has
presence in more than 20 countries across the world. Its corporate headquarters is in Bangalore.

Major Achievements of Infosys

 First Indian company to be listed on NASDAQ


 First company to be awarded the "National Award for Excellence in Corporate Governance"
conferred by the Government of India in 2000.
 Rated Best Employer of India in a study by Business Today-Hewitt Associates in 2001.
 First rank in the Business World's survey of "India's Most Respected Company" in 2002.

Knowledge at Organization level


Infosys provides consultancy and software services worldwide to Fortune 500 companies. It
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 presentation 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. 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 Company 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.

Because only a few employees write their experiences in the form of a paper, a LAN system
called the Process Asset Database captures the “as is” project deliverables. This contains project artifacts
such as project plans, design documents, and test plans. Users can search the documents based on
domain, technology, project type, project code, customer name, and so forth. This helps provide new
projects with information on similar, previously executed projects and helps set quantitative goals.

The People Knowledge Map is a directory of experts in various fields. It is an intranet-based


system where employees can search and locate experts. The directory’s usability is enormous because it
provides multiple nodes or topics. It serves as the bridge between two knowledge workers: the user and
the provider. As mentioned earlier Infosys need more than one system or mechanism for KM. Infosys’s
intranet portal Sparsh serves as the window for all systems and acts as the central tool. The company’s
Quality System Documentation is a repository of all process-related guidelines, checklists, and
templates. These serve to standardize the process followed in a project and hence the project’s outputs.
Infosys also has electronic bulletin boards for discussing technical and domain-related topics. In
addition, there are news groups and newsletters from various departments that discuss the latest
technology and business trends.

KM at the Project level


KM is even more important for a particular software project than it is for an entire organization.
The benefits of effectively managing and sharing knowledge in a project team include the ability to

 Easily react to customer requests


 Improve productivity through fewer defects and rework
 Improve teamwork

Dynamic KM is essential in a software project because in many cases the project depends on the
availability of the latest knowledge. Many Infosys projects have Web sites to manage knowledge
content. Each project also maintains a project-specific knowledge repository and a detailed training plan
with material to tackle project attritions. In addition, projects also hold weekly knowledge sharing
sessions where team members discuss and document past learning, so projects reuse knowledge
effectively and can reduce effort and cost.KM in projects is everybody’s responsibility. The project
manager defines the KM activities in the project plan, which then serves as a guide. Typically, about 2 to
3 percent of project effort is spent in KM activities.

Benefits for the Employees


When a person submits a document to the K-Shop, experts chosen from the People Knowledge
Map review the document in detail. If found acceptable, the K-Shop publishes it. The reviewer and
author are rewarded with knowledge currency units. When an employee reads or uses a document from
the K-Shop, he or she is encouraged to give KCUs for that document based on the benefits gained from
reading it. Authors can accumulate KCUs for their documents and redeem them for cash or other gifts.
Thus, KCUs serve twin objectives: they act as a mechanism both for rewarding knowledge sharing and
rating the quality of assets in the repository. For example, suppose an author submits a document. He or
she can get anywhere between three and 10 KCUs, depending on the document type. An external
literature would get three points and an internal white paper would fetch 10. In cash terms, 10 KCUs
translate to around 0.50 percent of the author’s salary. Each time another employee uses the document,
the author could earn between 0 and 10 KCUs. Hence, the author’s cumulative earning will increase
each time the document is used.

During K-Shop’s first year, employees submitted over 7,600 documents. KM has helped Infosys
increase its productivity and reduce defect levels. A rough estimate shows that Infosys reduced its
defect levels by as much as 40 percent. This significantly reduces the associated rework and thus the
cost of detecting and preventing defects. Also, effective reuse has increased productivity by 3 percent.
All of this has been possible due to faster access to accurate information and reuse of knowledge.

By 2005, Infosys had highly sophisticated KM systems in place. Uniformity of data was
maintained across the DCs of Infosys worldwide. All the centers could access real time data. The
centralized KM system in Infosys was accessible to all Infosys employees, from any of its DCs.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infosys
2. http://www.icmrindia.org/casestudies/catalogue/IT%20and%20Systems/ITSY055.htm
3. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=626404

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