Event

KM Summit 2007

With a billion plus population, India still lacks talent and as many industry leaders say, an ‘employable workforce’. In order to harness the country’s most abundant resource, viz, human resources, special measures need to be taken. Intellectual and technical infrastructure is required to leverage existing brainpower. By Neeraj Gandhi and Varun Aggarwal

( From left) Vikram Tiwathia (CIO, CII), Sunil Mittal, Dr. T Ramasami, Ashok Soota

The Knowledge Summit 2007 focused upon meeting the strategic requirement of the country through Knowledge Management by creating a better understanding of knowledge management practices, research and practical applications. CII, through this summit, brought together KM practitioners, policy makers as well as academicians and researchers.

Addressing the event, CII’s Past President and Chairman, the Managing Director of Mindtree Consulting, Ashok Soota stressed on the need for India to revolutionize traditional means of talent creation and knowledge production, via the educational system and introduce new mechanisms that help create a sustainable knowledge ecosystem through better knowledge management practices.

In order to focus on creativity and innovation, India needs to create open-ended exploration and experimentation opportunities for students. Stress should be given to humanities and liberal arts education as much as is given to science, engineering and medicine as innovations emerge from cross-disciplinary views.

Intellectual and technical infrastructure is required to leverage the existing brainpower, said Soota. To promote and develop the KM practices, Soota recommended the following:

• Introduce open ended exploration and experimentation into Indian education.
• The role of humanities and arts should be stressed in the educational system as cross disciplinary teams will lead the way when it comes to innovation.
• Create an annual get together of stakeholders in a summit to bring out clear actionable points that can be used to strengthen the knowledge ecosystem.
• Spread social movements around knowledge and the exchange of ideas.
• Build an online portal that creates connections and ends the problem of distance.

Sunil Mittal, Chairman and Group CEO, Bharti Enterprises, addressed the summit, urging the need to grab existing talent in the country. “India has been poor in managing knowledge. Our brains were picked up by the western world. Having missed several industrial revolutions in the past, we should make sure that the knowledge initiative should not be missed. This is a huge opportunity for us. There is a need to create a massive program of skill and development.”

Russia has harnessed knowledge well, but missed out on marketing knowledge-based products and services. India needs this marketing. “It is important for our future that we start a culture to manage knowledge and make it a part of our lives,” added Mittal.

Dr. T Ramasami, Secretary, Ministry of Science and technology and Director General, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research threw some light on the government’s initiatives towards KM. “The National Mission has set aside Rs.1,000 crores as a long term program to create and promote knowledge clusters. These knowledge clusters will develop and explore already existing resources along with the management of the surplus human capital in India.”

“The government is looking at larger propositions to develop India as the knowledge capital of the world and has initiated Public-Private Partnership for sustainable growth in the competitive global knowledge economy. The Intellectual Property Right (IPR) laws are effective in the country and innovators should be aware of their rights,” he added.

He also revealed that National Innovation Project is sourcing $6 billion from World Bank to backup innovation and inventors with risk capital.

The MAKE Award winners along with chief guest Kapil Sibal

In a session focused on Content Management practices, Patrik Lambe, President-Information and Knowledge, Management Society, Singapore, laid down six assumptions regarding content management (CM): it is pure technology, content is either structured or unstructured, a single strategy can meet all needs, a CM strategy should cover all content, the approach to CM should be single and that CM is distinct from collaborative management.

“Presently we throw technology at problems related to CM. We should rather invest in helping people and organizations get smoother around CM,” he said.

Amit Khanna, Head-Knowledge Management, Tata Steel, said that the biggest challenge is treating all content alike and finding one solution for all problems. He also pointed out that the problem lies in the quality of content and lack of 100% participation.

Uma Ganesh, Chief Corporate Development Officer, HBC Global Resourcing added, “Before we think of CM, we have to understand the content that needs to be discussed. It is important to address the definition of knowledge for an organization.”

Three questions should be asked before planning a CM strategy; Are we focusing on customer intimacy, are we focusing on operational efficiency, or is the company focused on innovation? “Every two years define knowledge and then design the CM strategy,” she added.

The knowledge landscape is now changing and we are seeing a transition from Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia, from Travelogues to eblogger and yellow pages to Google.

Rakesh Rajora, Vice President & Global Delivery Excellence Lead, Accenture said that there are four emerging patterns driving KM technologies: the Battle for tacit knowledge, leveraging swarm intelligence, collaboration through forced encounters and harnessing the power of space.

Kartik KS, CEO, 24X7 talked about five steps to be taken in a KM implementation:

• Initiate a model (which is most popular in the organization: e-mail, meetings etc)
• The technology deployed should be responsive to user needs
• What should be the content structure?
• Whether hardware and software are compatible?
• Whether data synchronization is possible

The Make Awards 2007

The annual Indian MAKE Award recognizes the best Knowledge Management (KM) efforts made by Indian organizations based on an annual study conducted by the Know Network. The annual Indian MAKE study serves as a benchmark to recognize those Indian companies which are leaders in effectively transforming enterprise knowledge into wealth-creating ideas, products and solutions.

The winners of the Indian MAKE Award 2007 are Bharti Airtel, Eureka Forbes, Infosys Technologies, Larsen & Toubro, Satyam Computer Services, TCS, Tata Steel, Wipro Technologies and the overall winner was Mindtree Consulting.

Speaking on the global MAKE award trends, Rory L Chase, Managing Director, Teleos said,“Most Indian companies are focusing on patents, whereas in Europe the focus is on social capital and building relations. In India work is required in intellectual capital management. Knowledge Management is not IT. IT is only an enabler.”

Over the last three years, the best organizations in India have remained the best. “The tier II level organizations have remained at the same level. KM is needed in these organizations. Mostly the organizations that become a part of MAKE awards are from IT. KM should be spread across other areas which are crucial for creating a knowledge economy, like education,” Chase added.

A strong and qualitative educational base is required for a strong knowledge economy, said Kapil Sibal, Minister of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences. “The foundation of a knowledge economy should be based on knowledge generation. There can be no knowledge generation without a strong educational base. India has a weak school education system. Out of 100 students who reach class XII, only 12 graduate.” There is a strong need to fix this for India to become a knowledge economy. Essentially there are three issues that have to be addressed:

The percentage of students graduating: Globally the figure is 27%. In India the figure is 12%. We cannot compete with such low numbers.

Quality of Education: There is a need to improve the quality of education. We have to produce graduates who fit into the economy. What I get from the industry is that only 25% of the graduates are employable. So out of the 12 students who graduate every year, only four are employable!

Need for an economic framework to absorb these graduates: We should create an environment to stop brain drain. This happened with the IT sector. After successfully providing appropriate jobs to IT graduates in India, we are now in a position to compete globally. Unless we are able to transform from a service economy to a manufacturing economy, we will not be able to absorb knowledge workers. This is essential to meet our 2020 goals.

“When I look at India in the 21st century, biology and chemistry will take us forward and help combat three major issues: food technology, healthcare and the environment. We need manpower in these three areas,” said Sibal.

Deepak Puri, Chairman and Managing Director, Moser Baer said that India is on the road to becoming a globally recognized knowledge giant and that it is emerging as the leader in the new knowledge economy, primarily due to India’s significant advantage over the developed world in terms of human resources.

He said that participating in KM significantly improves revenue growth, competitive advantage and overall employee development in the long-term whereas reduction in costs, improvement in marketing and enhanced customer focus are some of the immediate benefits of successfully implementing a KM program.

”Focusing on KM to strengthen internal factors is absolutely acceptable but companies should also gauge other external benefits such as share price growth and improved brand loyalty,” added Puri.

Vikram Tiwathia, Chief Information Officer, CII informed that KM has been short-listed as a special category in ‘e Governance Awards’. “The emphasis on KM can only be realized by bringing the knowledge ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ together in the globally connected environment.” KM should be a continuous process by bringing together the practitioners, inventors and investors to convert technology into value proposition and leverage the knowledge advantage, added Tiwathia.

neeraj.gandhi@expressindia.com
varun.aggarwal@expressindia.com