Indian Institute of Management

Kozhikode

Management Information Systems

Case Analysis: Infosys Technologies: The implementation challenges of
knowledge management initiatives

Submitted to: Dr.Radhakrishna Pillai R

Submitted By:

Kavya SS PGP/14/276 Kritika Gupta PGP /14/277

Kulbhushan Baghel PGP/14/278 Lokesh Singh PGP /14/279
Mahtaab Kajla PGP/14/280
 Q1. Why do you think the knowledge management system at Infosys faced such serious
implementation challenges? Defend your answer with examples from the case.

Answer: When we dole out monetary incentives to promote any scheme, it leads to unplanned
and uncontrolled growth leading to management problems. This sometimes leads to
inefficiency and dilution in quality ultimately resulting in loss of credibility.

The knowledge management (KM) group of Infosys first thought that by promoting the KShop
with Knowledge Currency Units (KCU), which could be accumulated and exchanged for
monetary rewards, would increase the knowledge sharing on the portal. But this led to over
contribution which resulted in employees experiencing information overload and consequently,
higher search costs for reusable knowledge. Secondly, the explosive growth in the no. of
contributions began to place a heavy burden on the limited number of volunteer reviewers.
This lead to a lax in the quality control of the shared knowledge, which resulted in knowledge
degradation. Also when questionable articles began to be rated consistently higher, the
credibility of the rating system itself came into question. There was also a fear that one of the
core values of the organization involving the company’s asking culture would deteriorate.

Q2. What steps did the KM group at Infosys take to improve participation in the KM
system? Why were some of these initiatives counterproductive? The KM group
responded with corrective initiatives. Do you think these will succeed? Why or why not?

Answer: To increase participation in the in the KM system, the KM group at Infosys introduced
“the knowledge currency unit (KCU)” incentive. According to the scheme, the employees who
contributed or reviewed contributions to KShop would be awarded KCUs which employees
could accumulate and exchange for monetary rewards and prizes. Also to motivate the
employees, their cumulative KCUs were displayed on a scoreboard on KShop which increased
their visibility and hence their standing in the organization. This served to be
Management Information Systems| 20/08/2010

counterproductive as an extremely large number of employees started contributing material

due to the monetary gain which got published irrespective of its quality thus leading to higher
search costs and deplorable quality.

The most important of corrective actions was to distance the knowledge sharing from the
monetary incentives to protect the spirit of community in the company by reducing the number
of KCUs awarded for reviewing contributions and increasing the minimum standard for cashing
the KCU points. They reevaluated the KCU score so that the contributions were reviewed not
only by volunteer reviewers and colleagues, but also by the end users. They also began to
demand tangible proofs for any high ratings to increase the accountability of the reviewers.
These initiatives would work as this would lead to contributions and reviews by only serious
employees who genuinely wanted to share knowledge.

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Second set of corrective actions focused on improving the knowledge management practices
within project teams and practice communities. These initiatives would work as they enabled
the codification and extraction of knowledge automatically and without much effort, even as the
teams carried out their project related tasks.

Q3. What change management initiatives should the KM group have initiated at Infosys
before attempting to develop and implement knowledge management at the company?
Defend your proposals, paying particular attention to the final quote in the case by a
long-time KM manager at Infosys.

Answer: The most prominent cause for the unsuccessful implementation was that the
employees were unprepared and unaware of the new system of sharing knowledge. They were
also unaware of the potential advantages an organization wide integrated knowledge
repository might bring to their team and individual knowledge enhancement. As human
tendency is to resist change, unprepared employees were more comfortable with their old
systems of doing things on their own or asking someone they know.

Change management initiatives that the KM group should have initiated can be:

 Educating employees about the system, how it would work and its benefits

 Workshops by experts in the knowledge management field

 Case studies and discussing examples of companies where this system had been
successfully implemented and how it had improved its projects efficiencies

 Proper role differentiation- assigning of knowledge managers in a project responsible

for collating, exchanging and providing knowledge

Management Information Systems| 20/08/2010