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base to support employees in those areas.” This led to the creation of two internal
consulting groups: the Domain Competency Group (DCG) and the Technology Compe-
tency Group (TCG). DCG had a business focus and was assigned the role of creating
knowledge in various domains. It had experts on transformation and business dynamics,
current trends, and regulatory and accounting practices of manufacturing, services, and
retail sectors. TCG was technology focused and had different subgroups. One of them
— the Software Engineering and Technology Laboratory (SETLabs), which developed
novel methodologies and technology architectures for use by Infosys’s project teams
around the world. People from these units were required to publish their research
regularly in IEEE journals.
Sensing an increase in business opportunities in e-commerce, ERP solutions, and
telecommunications, three new business units were added to scout for opportunities in
these fields. An engineering services group was also created to develop new knowledge
and competencies in these fields. The group transferred its members to the three units
to share competencies.
To involve the global locations in knowledge-creation exercise, knowledge-gener-
ating units were added to all the locations. “Proximity centers,” as these units were called,
internalized knowledge from the local environment. Usually, the centers worked closely
with technology start-ups in their respective markets to gain access to the latest
technologies. Knowledge pertaining to these technologies was supplied to the local
office and to the TCG in India.
Compulsory Sharing and Application
Once appropriate levels of growth and consolidation were achieved, management
started reinforcing knowledge sharing and application as core business activities. The
process team within the KM Group was assigned the responsibility to design appropriate
sharing and application processes.
Strong behavioral issues were attached to mandatory sharing and application. The
KM Group realized that highly talented professionals could not be forced to share their
knowledge. It would malign the whole rubric of Infosys’s philosophy toward its
intellectual assets. So they initiated mandatory sharing and application in areas where
the information being shared had a low knowledge component. Project management was
one such area. Project managers had to input mandatory project information at various
project stages in the integrated project management (IPM) application. The IPM was
slightly modified to require managers to provide experiential knowledge (Nanda &
DeLong, 2001). The idea was to encourage them to contribute knowledge artifacts during
the project itself, rather than as a time-consuming exercise at the end of the project. Once
completed, the document was uploaded as a project snapshot to the KM portal.
A similar process was initiated for mandatory sharing in project management.
Project managers were asked at various stages of the project to search for existing
knowledge inputs. The KM system was supplemented with the capability to record the
managers’ names and the knowledge artifacts they consulted. These records were
provided to the respective managers as well as their colleagues to help them decide on
potential usefulness of the artifacts.