KM, the Cognizant way

Cognizant, the Chennai-based software firm, is a trendsetter in the use of Knowledge Management. G Sankaranarayanan explains what KM means to Cognizant and how others could learn from Cognizant’s experience

According to R Ramkumar, Cognizant has actually managed to turn its experience in KM into a revenue-generating line of business

Most Indian firms aren’t exactly global leaders in the use of technology. IT penetration is taking off in Indian firms today, and there are some trendsetters, but these are few and far between. Take the hot field of Knowledge Management. Even the most IT-enabled Indian firms—with comprehensive electronic-KM infrastructure and systems such as intranets, HR guidelines and performance-linked incentives for KM practitioners—are content to let their CIOs or CEOs double up as Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs).

However, Cognizant is a trendsetter here and is perhaps one of the very few software companies in the country that has a senior position titled as the CKO, exclusively for knowledge management.

R Ramkumar, who’s the CKO at Cognizant, explains why an organisation needs a CKO in the first place. "Look at the sheer enormity of requirements of a KM system. You need to spearhead all knowledge efforts; make knowledge visible by ensuring smooth running of knowledge practices and leverage knowledge by ensuring that generated/transferred knowledge delivers for the organisation in the form of inputs for innovation, decision-making, etc. So if KM is to be practiced in its truest sense, the organisation certainly requires an individual focusing entirely on these efforts." He adds however that just a CKO alone does not help—there has to be a committed team to support the initiative in order for KM to become a success.

Ramkumar also explains the evolution of the CKO role in companies. "The CKO emerged in the early 1990s. In the initial days of KM practices CKOs routed bits of information through different pipes to the right people, then they built better networks: company-wide e-mail networks and corporate intranets, and, further down the line redesigned work and communications processes to promote collaboration."

The other C

From the way KM is being shaped at Cognizant, it becomes clear that it is not just about creating a culture conducive for knowledge creation, but more importantly, it is also about generating business.

"Yes, our KM department has a revenue target too," says Ramkumar. Having acquired substantial knowledge about KM in practice in the last four years since we embarked on the KM initiatives, developing KM systems itself has now become a new line of business."

ChannelOne

ChannelOne is the knowledge management portal developed by Cognizant. Postings on best practices, proposals, estimations and methodologies are created, managed and distributed online via this portal.

The company has around 60 knowledge harvestors, including eight knowledge auditors, whose role is to encourage everyone in the organisation to participate in digitising corporate memory and knowledge management initiatives.

"Earlier, people used to send bulk mail to all employees, whenever they wanted to know some crucial information but had no clue with whom it resided. But now, they can find everything at ChannelOne, which also has a feature called: ‘What I didn’t find,’ that enables users to inform the KM team about their knowledge requirements which are not available in the portal," Ramkumar explains.

Communities of Practice (CoP)

Another important facet of KM at Cognizant are the communities of practice. Ramkumar has this anecdote to share whenever he is asked to explain the power of CoP. "In the punch-card days, Indian Railways sourced out some of the processing operations that its existing staff could not handle in their eight-hour work shifts. At one point, the management decided to provide extra monetary benefits for its staff, who could work extra time to finish those additional processing operations. The staff were motivated by the monetary incentives but they were not happy about working long hours. So they started exploring all ways to share their experiences and knowledge together in creative and free-flowing ways that fostered new approaches for completing the additional work well within office hours. Finally, they were able to process all the additional processing work well within the eight hours. This is a classic example of ‘communities of practice (CoP)’ in practice."

He points out that CoPs have been instrumental in driving the World Bank’s KM strategy; At Chrysler, senior managers and engineers formed ‘tech-clubs’ comprising experts from different car platforms, which helped the company cut R&D costs by almost 50 percent. They now maintain an Engineering Book of Knowledge that captures variations in best practices.

"The effects of community activities are often delayed. But CoPs do pay off. For instance communities at Shell saved $2- 5 million for the company and contributed to revenues by more than $13 million in a single year," Ramkumar says. At Cognizant too, CoPs are making a difference to the company.

The returns

"KM is not about building a smarter intranet. Intranets are only part of the KM initiative in an organisation. It is also not about a one-time investment. KM is, in fact expensive and has a long gestation period. For these reasons, it is crucial to build metrics of the results of KM systems and continually monitor the return on the investment (RoI) made with the infrastructure." However, Ramkumar acknowledges that there is a lack of comprehensive standards for measuring the impact of KM. "In a sense the metric is the limitation," he feels and adds, "It is akin to one trying to compute the RoI of a telephone."

"Metrics data should be collectable without undue burden since it’s not the measures themselves that matter but the decisions that will be based on them. Measures that are expensive and cumbersome to collect will detract from the measurement program’s perceived value. The best measures would therefore be the ones that would be the natural outcome of people’s work," he explains.

Ramkumar further adds that it would be wrong to focus on the metrics that just emphasise hard (financial) results while totally ignoring the soft ones. Hard results are often dependent on soft employee attitudes and behaviour, and it would be wrong to ignore these. The other limitation is that outcomes can often be based on other reasons. Hence, it may not be possible to attribute a higher project win-rate, for instance, to KM, because it might also be the by-product of other factors such as competition, a skilled sales person, etc.

The thinking at Cognizant is that it may be better to carefully select a set of 15-20 metrics to act as a barometer in order to focus on and measure the past, present and future value of investments in KM simultaneously.