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The informal, closely-knit communities
of practices (CoPs) have existed at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
since the eighties, when its team size was just around a thousand.
However, with the phenomenal growth in size (now, 25,000 plus),
expansion into new domains and markets, this geographically dispersed
software firm uses online platforms to facilitate the formation
of more CoPs on new technology domains and managerial practices.
Considerable care had gone even into the
architecture of TCS’ own development centres located across
the country to encourage employee “conversations”—the
lifeline of lively communities (of practices). “Welcome to
our Sholinganallur development centre,” invites the chief financial
officer S Mahalingam, to show how the building allows employees
to talk to each other. “This centre consists of modules, each
dedicated to one particular technology or a client or an industry
practice. These structures lead to garden terraces, where employees
gather during their break for animated, informal conversations.
Those conversations could be personal, about their colleges or native
places, but they provide the necessary bonding for the communities
that are technology centric,” he says, adding, that when they
converse with their colleagues, they often get solutions for problems
they were vexed with.
Organisational memory
To continue to facilitate the conversations
across a growing and diversified team spread across different time
zones and locations has been something Mahalingam and his colleagues
are trying to do—with the help of IT. His understanding is
that vibrant communities—the repositories of organisational
memory—enhance organisational capabilities.When capturing organisational
memory becomes a necessity, the communities become inevitable. Mahalingam
explains, “In traditional set-ups, organisational memory resided
in human memory. It could even be about customers of one particular
geographic location. The knowledge was passed from one person to
another within the organisation through some type of mentoring processes.”
Now the mentoring process takes place online through mailing lists,
Web postings, etc. TCS has built a Web-based electronic knowledge
management (EKM) portal—Ultimatix. Supported by this Web portal
and several Intranet sub- portals are 26-odd divisions of CoPs—one
each for 10 major industry practices, 10 service practices and six
corporate functions.
Mahalingam explains the two important knowledge
types in an organisation that CoPs and IT tools can help capture
and disseminate. “There is knowledge pertaining to operational—that
is on how to deal with a particular type of project or how to do
business with a particular customer. Or knowledge about a business
domain, like healthcare, telecom, etc. Or it could even be about
how to do business itself. And the knowledge that has to do with
the people and their project expertise. For instance, our US team
could have delivered a project to a client based in the same country.
In the event of the same client moving to Singapore, there needs
to be a way to transfer the knowledge of our development team in
the US, which had already learned a good deal about this customer,
tothe Singapore team.”
The beginnings
“The phrase communities of practices
might have been coined some five years back, but there have been
CoPs in the past as well. We simply did not have the software tools
then and that is the only difference,” says Mahalingam. The
earliest “group” in TCS was based on the migration of
technologies headed by Professor Kesav Nori. Then teams were formed
for mainframe, Unix and databases.
K Ananth Krishnan, certified quality auditor
(CQA), architecture and technology consultant, who was heading the
mainframe group, recollects the group practices in the initial days:
“Typically such groups were built around one or two experts
in that particular fields. Then there were only about a thousand
employees in TCS and the physical separation also was manageable.
We almost instantly came to know what were the opportunities and
solutions for the problems in the small setup.”
The groups kicked off formal documentation
practices with the members writing down the best practices. Says
Krishnan, “In the mid-eighties, we started documenting the
problems and solutions. For mainframe, we had over 1,500-odd case
studies. We had this knowledge base to fall back on. Similarly for
quality area, we had around 40 reviewed case study documents way
back in 1993. In the late nineties, the community practices had
been formalised.”
About EKM
EKM was the next big thing to happen to
the community infrastructure, where the activities can take place
with a wider user base. The precursor to Ulitimatix was the intranet
system built after 1997. The intranet is still accessible only to
the employees in India.
“We concentrated on process change
management and technology change management areas. Also we started
creating Process Asset Libraries (PALs), which have technology and
process-related information, case studies, etc, for project leaders,”
informs Krishnan, adding, “We have over 5,000 project leaders
in TCS who have experience in the range of five to ten years. Not
all of them have equal expertise in all project aspects. So, we
formed the Software Engineering Group and made available the PAL
copies to all development centres through the intranet.”
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| TCS’s Sholinganallur centre: Conversation
is the key to knowledge sharing |
Then came Ultimax, which made the knowledge
globally available. The PAL library and knowledge bases, which were
hosted on the intranet, became a part of Ultimatix. It presently
has sub-portals for quality management system, software productivity
improvement, training materials, tools information, among others.
The company has EKM administrators for each practice and subject
group with defined responsibilities. They edit the documents and
approve it for publishing.
Krishnan explains how the “relationship-based”
exchanges, so typical of small groups, could still be maintained
in the networked era. “The groups are still there. With technology
we made them communicate with rocket power. Still in each ommunity—at
sub-levels—we have members in the range of 10 or 20 and not
more than that. They typically work on a single site. For instance,
our telecom group is based at Hyderabad and most members of this
community are located there.”
Measuring the success
Measuring the return on investment and
the success of CoP is not entirely possible. However, the level
of participation of the members could indicate the vibrancy and
activeness of a particular CoP. Krishnan informs, “Between
January 2003 and June 2003, CoP members had exchanged around 10,000
document transactions (uploads and downloads) pertaining to the
industry practices and 21,000, service practices via Ultimatix.
The telecom CoPs alone had 6,000 transactions. This excludes the
intranet-based community activities.”
Though active community participation is
not included in an employees’ appraisal process, it does count
indirectly. According to Krishnan, the more expensive part of building
the EKM and CoPs is not the hardware or software, but the investment
the company makes on the employee-experts themselves. “Again
the experts are not here to participate in the community and share
knowledge by writing documents or taking training classes alone.
These are only a part of their routine tasks. They are the innovators
of the company,” he points out.
Diversified groups
Mahalingam emphasis that the sole objective
of knowledge creation is knowledge dissemination, especially to
diversified functional groups. In his opinion though EKM and CoPs
are evolved confining to the people who create solutions, the knowledge
they create should be extended to the staff of other functional
areas as well. “From the strategic point of view, you have
to extrapolate all sorts of data to do business. The marketing team
with access to seemingly technical, project related data, can actually
understand, for instance, whether China is an emerging market in
a particular segment.” Though the CoPs exist for human resource,
marketing and other functional areas, TCS, which is emerging as
a IT consulting service firm, rather than just a software development
company, can expect to have more CoPs on management practices in
the future.
The future
The challenge before the company is to
make collaboration more cost effective. “We want to bring the
cost incurred on travel, telephone and physical meetings down. The
company has already minimised the cost of the first point communication
by establishing mailing lists for the members. Now the cost of the
first touch is almost nothing thanks to the Web. However, cost is
involved in the second level of in-depth, comprehensive collaboration
among the members of the CoPs, involving phone, travel, etc,”
says Krishnan. He points out, “We do video conferencing but
a lot has to be simplified. It should not be like walking into a
room to use a video conferencing facility. It should be simple at
the desktop level and not in one designated area. People should
be able to do this with relative ease.”
To facilitate interaction among members
working in other offices, TCS will be rolling out new systems that
would make it far more easy for more comprehensive collaborations
among employees working in geographically dispersed areas.
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