Learning Services

Srikantan Moorthy (Tan)

First of all, corporates have no choice in terms of making investment in knowledge management for the same reason that you have asked the question – because the diversity of needs is increasing. If that is the case, the only answer can be through technology. Therefore, there have to be investments in things that can capture knowledge wherever it was generated so that it can be used whenever it is required by a group of people at whatever point in time. Therefore, corporate cannot get away from doing that, especially in the knowledge business. 

Now, how fast can we do this?  That is where I think there is a challenge of how do you capture knowledge the moment it is created and how do you give people incentives to make that knowledge systemically available? Those are challenges that are related to cultural issues, and to some extent there are some technology issues. 

For example, on the cultural front it is about if I am able to go to a system that gives me something when I am in trouble, then I have the capability and motivation to go and put something into it. But that is a Catch-22 situation and we need to keep creating environments that help give people what they want so that you can also expect to get something back.

A good way of doing that is when you look at knowledge or systems or applications that are created when you are applying for an award, use that information, because when you are writing something for winning an award you are putting your thinking caps on. 

Now, if I have a mechanism to capture all the award applications and put them in a knowledge management system tomorrow, you can go there and get that information related to that, so that is one approach from a cultural standpoint.

From a technical standpoint, if you were to look at what happens in sports: there is somebody who is giving you a commentary of what is happening and there is a lot of knowledge being captured on what is going on. And that can be used later to look at what happened during the event – whether it was during a bowling session or whatever.  A similar thing in terms of when I am solving or fixing a maintenance issue, if there is a way for me to immediately record what it was going through, and then there is a way to capture that knowledge which can be reused with much more relevance.  So, those are the two aspects.

This will let the tacit knowledge come out to some extent and it builds on it, because you will go to a system if you are getting it when you want it, because you are never going to go to a system to give something to it.

Infosys’ Learning Services recently conducted a panel discussion  on the topic  “ The new world of Learning “. We are running a series of questions that the audience posed. The panelists were - Srikantan Moorthy, Vice President and Head - Education and Research; Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni, Principal Researcher- SETLabs and  Kaiser Masood, Principal Consultant, Infosys Leadership Institute. 

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