Role of "Domain knowledge" in Global Engineering
I was at the Nasscom Global Engineering Leadership Summit held at Mumbai last week. The amount of interest the topic - "Importance of Domain Knowledge in global engineering" generated was noteworthy. The Summit was attended and addressed by leaders from engineering fraternity. The gathering debated the opportunities and challenges that are faced in globalization of engineering. Also discussed were trends and views on India emerging as Global Engineering hub
What was apparent is that the the potential role for India in Global engineering is very significant. The analysis by Booz consulting puts the number of 50 Billion USD by 2020 for Engineering services from India. Given this context, it is important to understand the dominant factors that will drive this new wave.
Provided the emphasis on "Domain knowledge" as one of the crucial parameters for accelerating the growth of Engineering in India, it is imperative to delve into the topic to understand it better.
We all know that the Engineers continue to learn through their career and in process gain a lot of experiential know-how similar to other professions. My understanding of domain knowledge is that it constitutes of Product technology, its historical evolution, various design decisions made during the development of same/similar products, the processes used, the inferences drawn under particular conditions and in many a cases thumb rules concluded out of this experience. This understanding is much above the knowledge of basic engineering discipline (like mechanical engineering, electronics, automotive etc..), more so it is about the application of engineering principles to a given product family / industry. The question then emerges is - how this can be shared effectively and efficiently, knowing that not all of it is documented or can be documented.
In my experience working with various clients across geographies, following are some of the practices which can enable build-up of domain knowledge faster for globally augmented team.
- Traditional way of the knowledge being passed "on the job" with senior engineer acting as mentor to other learning engineers.
- Loosely defined processes and approach for a given set of problems, which leads engineer in a right direction to get the desired result
- Capturing key learnings, practices and thumb rules
- Taking newly joined engineers through the entire lifecycle and process and practices of product development in the company
- Getting engineers to experience the up-stream and downstream activities (visibility to market research, manufacturing and field use)
Technology has been a great enabler to deomcratize the sharing of knowledge....
- Product Lifecycle management (PLM) offers an approach and system support for formal documentation of important product decisions and evolution
- Digital video and voice capture facilitates you to see plant and machinery in action which would be otherwise very difficult
- Use of wikis in an enterprise enables quick and more updated information among various functional teams and partners
- Use of CAx tools for modelling, analysis, simulation provides the basic language for exchange of ideas among remotely located teams
- Off-course providing opportunity to travel and interact in person with teams and witness the processes continues to hold its charm
The hunger for learning exhibited by young engineers in India is a great motivator to shorten this cycle of learning. Would appreciate your view/thoughts/learnings/anecdotal experiences which will help us to discover this thread more
Comments
Community learning is something that is catching up quickly now a day in many organizations. Domain COEs is providing a platform for people with similar skills/bent of mind to get together and share their knowledge. This is also helping solving bigger problems which would have gone un-noticed.
Posted by: Gowrish Bhaskar | November 30, 2009 12:20 PM
Today, most of us follow the practices & tools named by Vikas & Bhaskar here.
But the bigger question is; ‘are we providing the right environment to our workforce to motivate and generate interest about domain knowledge?’
We do have a motivated pool of young engineers who keen to work; but not many would take up a challenge to work without a process handbook?
How many of them would be able to deliver something innovative or out of box solution to the client? Can they? If not, why?
The only reason is – most of the times we don’t have a challenging environment around. Also, the kind of engineering work is carried out India, 80% of it is ‘Low end work’. So, any person doing a low end job would hardly be interested about the domain knowledge.
Therefore, the key is to provide exposure and platform to our teams to work on latest technology & tools and provide them an opportunity to work on complex work packages.
But, the next question is - How can we get more complex projects to India? Do we have the capability? Well, we need another blog for this....
Posted by: Ninad Saney | December 1, 2009 08:11 AM
In principle, I do agree with Ninad's comments on the subject.
My belief, it is a "chicken or egg first" situation. Several OEMs and the likes, looking to outsource high end work would only feel comfortable if we have the domain knowledge. So, unless we have the domain knowledge we will not get high end work and unless we have high end work we may not get domain knowledge.
So, from a sales perspective how do we sell high end work without the domain knowledge and operationally how do we foster the growth of domain knowledge within the organization with out a sale are the questions to address.
This only points to one fact that we cannot be demand driven here but should be more forthcoming through investments from the supply side.
Posted by: Mahesh Shivaprasad | December 7, 2009 08:49 AM