Infosys Case Study

INFOSYS CASE STUDY

Question1: Introduction to the organisation, knowledge management needs and focus at infosys

1- Introduction to the organisation

Founded in 1981 in India, Infosys is an Indian software services company with their headquarters in Bangalore, Indian. The organisation now has current revenue of over $ 2.1 billion (case study, 2006) and has over 69,000 employees worldwide. Infosys is one of the leading information technology service companies in India that uses an extensive non-US based offshore infrastructure to provide managed software solution to clients worldwide (Sumita Raghuram, 2001) . Sumita further states, that the organisation has seventeen state-of-the-art software development facilities throughout India and one development centre in Canada. The company opened up the Global Delivery Model for the development of customised software solutions. This model was based on the principal of taking work where it can be done best, and made the most economic sense at low risk. According to Kochikar & Suresh in 2004 , the company has been assessed at Level 5 of the SEI CMM (Capability Maturity Model) in 1999 and at Level 5 of the PCMM (People Capability Maturity Model) in 2002 and has also been accorded a number of other recognitions in the fields of corporate governance, financial reporting and human resource management. Infosys keeps employees age at 26 years by providing sportive, leisure and recreation facilities to its workers at each of its development centres.

2- Evolution of KM at Infosys

Knowledge management (KM) has come to encompass the gamut of organisational processes, responsibilities and systems directed towards the assimilation, dissemination, harvest and reuse of knowledge. "Definition of KM" In simpler terms, KM is the answer to the question, "How can the organisation update and use its knowledge more effectively?" (Kochikar, 1999) . With the understanding of the definition of KM, it can be possible to analyse the challenges of KM that has arose in the infosys context. Infosys did not start KM until the mid-1999, however they had some other practices that used the same spirit has KM and formed a useful backdrop. Considering the amount of information they had, the organisation considered having an organisation-wide repository that could protect experimental learning gained during the execution of some software project, and make available for posterity. In 1992 they developed a system called Body of Knowledge (BoK) that was implemented initially by the means of a simple, home-grown software application. In 1997 the system was hosted on the web using HTML content, and made available on the then-fledgling intranet. As the company grew they had multi-location and had a higher number of employees. This made it difficult to rely in the BoK system that used informal mechanisms. Therefore a more sophisticated system was developed and called People-Knowledge Map (PKM), and provided pointers to experts in the organisation. In 1999 the organisation started to implement KM. The next paragraph is aimed determining the KM needs and focus at Infosys.

2- Knowledge management needs and focus

The primary goals in embarking in KM was to ensure productivity, efficiency and quality were sustained, as the company grew and as large numbers of employees were inducted. Other objectives were to increase the reuse of knowledge assets to achieve higher efficiencies and competitive advantages to apply knowledge to further reduce defect rate, to protect company's core software services business by gaining higher end consulting markets through effective use of knowledge and to enhance the brand value of the company. Lindvall & Rus in 2003 argued that, the field of software engineering have some interesting knowledge related characteristics, since software development is knowledge-driven. Aurum in 2003 stated that knowledge within the field of software engineering is dynamic and evolves with technology and depends on creativity of not only individuals but also the whole teams. From the KM objectives of Infosys it can be noticed that their main focus is to maintain the business and gain competitive advantage. However, for KM to be effective the organisation needs to identify its KM needs. According to Kondal, 2006 , there are six factors that determine the KM needs of an organisation. These factors are:

 Knowledge dispersion: intellectual assets management

 Employee turnover:

 Market environment: general business focus

 Virtual working:

 Innovation:

 Value addition: general business focus

A- Knowledge dispersion

This factor plays a big role in all organisations that use KM because of their characteristics such as size, many business divisions, mergers, acquisitions, and global presence. Because of the size of Infosys, the organisation needs to be able to capture and use the knowledge detained by the knowledge workers spread around the world. Beside the Bangalore's headquarter, Infosys worldwide sales headquarters were in Fremont, California, and it had branch sales offices in Atlanta, Bangalore, Boston, Chennai, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Frankfurt, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai (formerly Bombay), New Delhi, New York, Seattle, Tokyo, and Toronto (Narayana Murthy, 1999) . Infosys need a tool that will enable access to its recourses by all its members.

B- Market environment

- Create a strategy that encompasses management of market knowledge include customers, partners, and competitors

- Establish special interest groups for managing knowledge

- Create customer and business partner events

- Create specialist KM roles to capture customer knowledge

- Provide controlled and relevant access to the organisational KM portal to the customers and business partners

- Develop a unified market knowledgebase by integrating the customer, business partner, and competition knowledge, from all business units.

C- Virtual working

- virtual work and self service functions are integrated part of the KM strategy and programs

- Virtual

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