Contents

• Contents of the assignment –
• 1 Introduction 2
• 2 Infosys Technologies Limited 3
• 3 Knowledge Management 4
• 4 Knowledge Management in Infosys 5
• 4.1 The Initial Steps 5
• 4.2 KM as full time discipline at Infosys 8
• 4.3 Challenges faced along the way of implementing KM 10
• 5 Analysis of KM at Infosys 11
• 6 Recommendations 13
• 7 Conclusion 14
• 8 References 16

Description

In the past few decades corporate management is increasingly realizing knowledge as an important corporate asset. There have been serious efforts to document, store and reuse knowledge and insights of the manpower derived out of experience and exposure to processes and technologies. According to Eisenhardt & Santos (2002), the corporate entities have transited from the resource based tradition to knowledge based tradition (Resu, Ranft,, Lamont & Adams, 2009), Knowledge has grown from insignificant asset of the company to become the key to provide competitive advantage to the companies (Resu, Ranft,, Lamont & Adams, 2009). Now knowledge management has grown to the extent that different inquiring systems have been developed to create knowledge (Parrish & Courtney, 2009). There were times when individual employees had greater significance within the organization because of their knowledge in handling a particular process or system. These days it is the knowledge of the company in handling a particular system or process that amounts to the fact that whether or not the company gets the order to execute a particular process. Even at the individual level within the organization, it is not the amount of knowledge an employee has that is valued but it is the willingness of the employee to share the knowledge with co employees that matters to the organization most. The organizational management no more encourages the presence of knowledge pockets within the organization but a distributed system wherein every employee is be able to access the knowledge and expertise of expert employees. In order to do this, organizations have invested in many systems such as employee forums wherein employees openly express their difficulties in carrying out a particular task and seek expert guidance from those within the organization. The wide use of internet and intranet within the organizations has contributed to this cause where employees discuss on e-forums. Another method that organizations adopt is the development of knowledgebase or Kbase using inputs from employees within the organization. The importance of knowledge especially in the IT sector is so much so that the managements invest as much money in documentation of coding and flow charts as in software developmental efforts itself. The paper does an analysis of KM in Infosys Technologies based on the journal article ‘Towards a knowledge sharing organization: Some of the challenges faced by Infosys’ by Kochikar & Suresh (2009). The paper discusses the journey of Infosys from a resource centric organization to knowledge centric organization and the methods the company adopted over the years to hone knowledge and skills among the employees and of the company as a whole. The paper also discusses the rationale behind adopting certain methods to become the knowledge powerhouse. Finally the paper makes a few recommendations to Infosys to fine tune their knowledge management processes.