Abstract

Nandan Nilekani, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Infosys Technologies (Infosys), sat at his desk at the company’s headquarters in Bangalore, India, reading an email from one of his account managers in his North American operations. The manager, Vivek Pradhan, had just landed a project with a major Detroit automobile manufacturer, and was commenting to Nandan on how instrumental the company’s knowledge management (KM) program was in his securing the project. Vivek told Nandan that his client had given him 48 hours to develop a pre-proposal on upgrading its nationwide sales and order operations. He added that his technical team had never seen such a project. Vivek felt he could never meet his pre-proposal deadline, but that evening he received an email from Nandan announcing the launch of a new Domain Competency Group (DCG) as part of the company’s nascent knowledge management (KM) initiative. As stated in the email: DCG would serve as a centralized think-tank to provide round-the-clock knowledge support on various industrial domains to our practice units around the world. Vivek further explained that a quick call to the DCG contact number helped him locate a similar project completed for a German automotive company. He was sent the necessary materials, including a client presentation, which proved very similar to what his client had in mind. After reading the email, Nandan sat back in his chair feeling quite pleased at the success of the five-year-old KM program. Infosys’ KM implementation was guided by the KM Maturity Model (KMM) (see Exhibit 1). 2 Infosys was currently working towards attaining the fourth level of KM maturity. However, one requirement was seriously lacking and would impede progress to the next level: Infosys did not have robust metrics for assessing productivity benefits of the KM program.

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