Patni gains competitive advantage through KM

Knowledge Management has often been perceived as a technology only for preserving and enhancing the knowledge base of a company. But take a look at India’s sixth largest software services player—Patni—and you’ll find that this company is not only making innovative use of KM for fostering knowledge but also for gaining competitive advantage. SRIKANTH R P has the details

While the KM culture was present in Patni, the company wanted to scale this to a greater level and motivate more and more people to share their knowledge, says SATISH JOSHI

On a wintry December evening last year, Patni’s office in Mumbai received a request for proposal (RFP) for a large project at the last minute. While on normal days company officials would have been jubilant, this time you could only find anxious faces. Worried because it was the month of December, when most of the company’s employees in the US were out on a holiday. Additionally, Patni had very little time to react and had only four working days to work out a proposal for the project on offer. While few would have expected the company to submit a decent proposal, astonishingly Patni went on to win the contract with the help of its knowledge management (KM) tools. While the concept of KM has always been seen only as a technology for fostering knowledge within the company, Patni’s case shows that KM can be also used as a key competitive advantage over others in the race.

KM at Patni

Though Patni has always had a KM culture, there was no single repository holding content for all the different SBUs. For example, Patni had four different intranets in domains like insurance, engineering services and e-business. While there was always a healthy exchange of information between different SBUs on an informal basis, there was no documented process for flow of information. Around the year 2002, as the organisation started looking forward to a new phase of growth, it started looking at various KM tools to help foster growth and improve productivity. The KM initiative was seen as a strategic decision as the organisation was rapidly growing and had over 5,600 employees. Employee inputs were therefore extremely crucial to the growth of the organisation.

After evaluating a host of options for a period of six months, the company selected ‘Livelink’ from Open Text Corporation. Unlike the traditional route of integrating current systems with legacy systems, Patni decided to rip apart the entire system and go in for a totally new one. This was done because Patni knew that over time it would become difficult to maintain the older systems. Accordingly, a knowledge centre was created where the knowledge base of every SBU was pooled and stored in a central location. To ensure the success of the KM initiative, Patni even formed a separate team and drafted a blueprint for charting KM plans. But unlike the mistakes most corporations make, Patni knew that the KM tools were only technologies that would increase efficiencies and the success of the project depended on one critical factor—its people.

Says senior vice president Satish Joshi, "A particular technology can ensure only 20 percent success of a project. But the critical part is the people factor. While the KM culture was present in Patni, we wanted to scale this to a greater level and motivate more and more people to share their knowledge." Accordingly, Patni went on a massive ‘motivation’ drive. Almost overnight posters were put up, different award schemes were announced and employees were encouraged to give feedback. At the end of each quarter, the photographs of the top five contributors were prominently put up on the knowledge management repository. To encourage contributors, Patni even gives points to employee suggestions, which are then counted in the annual appraisal of the employee.

Ensuring best practices

To ensure that the content in the knowledge repository always stays current, every document has a ‘valid till date’ clause and periodic author reviews to ensure the same. The knowledge management team even tracks content usage and creation of new content across different SBUs. Patni has appointed a knowledge management representative in each SBU to evangelise creation of content. To update the knowledge of different SBUs, Patni also gives weekly updates about the industry scenario. While previously knowledge in discussion boards was never captured, with the current system Patni has converted the discussion threads into useful FAQ documents. The motivation provided to the employees has paid off and can be seen from the fact that within seven months of launch the knowledge centre received more than 4,500 contributions and one lakh hits.

Benefits

The knowledge management initiatives have converted Patni into an organisation of the New Economy and almost every employee of Patni uses KM tools actively today. Explains Joshi, "We have seen efficiencies in almost every department. For example, consider a salesperson in a new region who wants to learn about a particular domain. Previously, he would have had to call the Indian office and request documents. But now, armed with the new KM tools, he can access the Web-based content from any place on the planet and prepare superb proposals according to the geography and language. The same proposals can be reviewed by the senior management and updates suggested."

Today, more than 50 percent of Patni’s proposals are completed in a time span of around two days. Previously the same used to take more than a week—more than 90 percent of the time was used in aggregating and analysing data. Similarly, in the case of software projects, if there is a problem with any particular technology, a programmer can shoot a question to the entire organisation of 6,000 people and get his queries answered. Apart from the time reduced in creating high quality proposals, Patni has also been able to increase its productivity by 5 percent compared to last year by using KM initiatives.. The company has also set up a remote server in the US, which holds cached data to enable faster loading of content for employees posted abroad.

Patni’s innovative use of KM has even helped it grab the ‘best knowledge management solution’ award by OpenText Corporation. The significance of this award can be seen from the fact that global biggies like British Telecom, Hutchison 3G and Siemens Financial Services were also vying for the same award.

While most organisations believe that KM is only about technology, it’s actually the other way around. Joshi sums it up perfectly when he says, "Processes and culture are critical to success, technology is only an enabler." That one’s for the hundreds of organisations that look at KM as a magic potion without understanding the people part.