On the marketing and sales side, we would initially create each proposal and presentation from scratch. It took a lot of time and a lot of mistakes would creep in. We then went in the opposite direction and created a single standard deck, but then it was not very customer- or industry- or technology-specific and so was not very effective by itself. We had to approach this in a more sophisticated way.
With a lot of effort by my colleagues and over some time, Nagarro developed a fairly sophisticated KM process for the sales and marketing material. Presented in a simplified way, this is how it works:
- When we come across a sales opportunity, a request may go to the KM group asking for slides on, say, "Europe, manufacturing, chemical industry, SAP, automation, manufacturing execution systems".
- The KM group will go to their Microsoft SharePoint repository and pick out all slides on these topics and send them to the sales or presales (technical sales) folks.
This is the RETRIEVAL and DISTRIBUTION of knowledge. - Now, outside the KM group, the slides may be modified for this particular customer, new slides may be added and some may be subtracted.
- When the presentation is finally delivered to the client, it is compulsory for a copy to be sent back to the KM group. The KM group takes the presentation and stores it as such in its repository in a systematic way.
You may call this the STORAGE of knowledge. - But the most important thing the KM group does is to take the presentation, slide by slide, and identify which slides are new, and which slides have been modified from the original. Incidentally, with new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) technology, such identification can be automatic if the slide was edited while the user was connected with the MOSS.
- The KM experts give new slides relevant tags (e.g. "factory planning") and store them for future requests after carefully editing out customer-specific details.
- In parallel, the slides that have been modified are studied carefully to see if they are a) improvements on existing slides, or b) new flavors of existing slides (such as a "Europe" slide with a "Germany" flavor"). Improvements on existing slides are saved as newer versions after checking with senior personnel. New flavors of existing slides are also stored separately as such.
Steps 5-7 comprise what may be loosely called the IDENTIFICATION and CLASSIFICATION of new knowledge. - Of course the work does not end there. The slides have to all be kept up to date. For example, if at any time in the future, anything changes on a slide (let us say Nagarro gets a new European quality certification and someone modifies the Europe slide), the different flavors of the same slide must also be updated.
One may term this the MAINTENANCE of knowledge.
A couple of our friends run overseas KM centers - Nitin Seth runs the McKinsey Knowledge Center and Nitin Aggarwal runs the ZA Associates Knowledge Center (he was formerly the head of the McKinsey Knowledge Center too). Alok Aggarwal co-founded Evalueserve which is a pioneer in this general area. Do click on these links and see what these folks are up to.
You may also want to check out the technology aspects of KM using Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) or look at the Wikipedia entries on the subject.
6 comments:
Respected Sir,
You had once written a blog on the new handheld technologies. I had left a reply on that blogpost. Maybe you may have not seen it due to some reason so please sir if you can give a feedback on my reply then i can see my fallacies in that.
Fairly simple issues with a couple of the options, Nikhil. How can a display and interaction device solve gene-related questions, for instance? The tourist guide idea was a good one though.
Thank You Sir for providing me a response on my fallacies and at the same time appreciating right direction thinking.Was there any winner in that competition. If yes? Please tell who was the honoured proton or no one was able to match your expectations.
Nikhil Sukhlecha
Fall09
KM, fairly a fascinating concept these days. Much to say about the strategic advantage over high attrition rates in IT industry, with KM when your people move or switch, knowledge and expertise remains with the organization- what wonders technology is doing.
Knowledge is power and so is the extent with which it can be used.
This article gave me a fairly good idea of mechanism to implement KM in organizations. My mind wandered back to the days, when Reliance Infocomm was shaping the communication revolution in the country and I used to hit on their knowledge management portal on regularly basis on the company intranet. I wondered how they imagined of doing this thing at such an early time.
Sir thanks for sharing the knowledge with us.
May I suggest switching to Google docs. All your problems will be solved!
Unfortunately, mindless search is not quite enough.
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