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operational efficiency to KM. About 90% reported saving at least 1 day every quarter,
and about 20% to 30% reportedly saved up to 8 days (Ravindra & Suresh, 2003). But
Nandan was not satisfied with the anecdotal evidence. “We really needed a robust set
of quantitative measures,” he confessed.
As Infosys inched toward level 3 of its KMM model, Dr. Suresh briefed Nandan that
although they had started working toward building survey-based and metrics-based
value assessment measures, it might still be some time before the efforts fructified. Some
questions they were struggling with included what could be the specific approaches to
gather evidence of KM’s contribution to business value creation? What were the issues
involved in implementing each of these approaches? Would it be ever possible to
measure KM’s return on investment (ROI)?
While the KM Group was busy developing assessment metrics for KM-enabled
value creation inside the company, Nandan tried to focus on the potential usefulness of
the KM initiative even beyond firm’s boundaries. He realized that one of the biggest
benefits of the initiative was its contribution to make Infosys a truly scalable company.
He could notice the fact that in the past four years Infosys was learning more, and more
importantly, it was learning better. Existing knowledge facilitated creation of new
knowledge, thus enhancing firm’s innovative capabilities and enabling it to exploit
business opportunities earlier and better than the competition. “Going at this pace,” he
asserted, “we should become proactive problem definers than reactive problem solvers.
We should be able to tell our clients of the problems they will face in future, and advice
them of some solutions leveraging IT. But making this giant leap involves a whole set
of scalability issues and I don’t even know what they are!”
On a separate note, Nandan also wondered if it would ever be possible to facilitate
tacit knowledge sharing within an economically and temporally feasible framework.
“That is the final frontier, where we can claim true individual empowerment — every
employee having access to every iota of organizational knowledge. Also I can imagine
a host of trust issues in such a situation. We need to ask ourselves a whole lot of
questions. I wish I knew those questions, and the answers to those questions too.”
EPILOGUE
In this case study, we highlight a firm’s efforts to implement knowledge manage-
ment to fulfill its strategic requirements. The case study can possibly be used to develop
a theoretical approach to build KM as an organizational capability. A useful building
block can be the resource-based and the knowledge-based perspectives discussed in the
strategy literature. The resource-based view discusses organizational capabilities as a
source of competitive advantage, and the knowledge-based-view highlights knowledge
management as one such capability. Utilizing these perspectives and the knowledge
inherent in this case study, future researchers can develop, and subsequently test,
normative prescriptions for building the KM capability. Current work of one of the
authors is a step in this direction (Mehta, Hall, & Boulton, 2004). To practitioners, this
would provide an approach to understand, measure, and predict a firm’s capacity to
create value by implementing a successful KM program.