km tigers-employee initiatives

8/3/2019 KM Tigers-employee Initiatives

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KM tigers

ICICI Bank has grown six-fold since its KM strategy was established in 2000, makingit the second biggest in India today. But that strategy has been robust enough to grow

with it. Central to ICICI Banks success has been its flexible, innovative methods, anda plethora of KM tools that were cannily marketed to staff from the very start.

By Deepa Prabhu

ICICI was founded in the mid-1950s at the behest of the World Bank, the Indiangovernment and various captains of industry in India. Its purpose back then was to

provide medium and long-term development finance for Indian business.

In the mid-1990s its business strategy shifted to take advantage of the opening up of

the Indian economy. The idea? To create a diversified financial-services supplieroffering a range of products, instead of concentrating purely on project finance. ICICIBank was, therefore, established in 1994 to provide retail banking facilitiesacross India.

The idea was well timed and proved wildly successful. Today, it is the second largestbank in India with assets of almost $40bn and can boast a network of more than 570branches and a steadily growing international business, with branches inthe UK, Russia and Canada.

First steps

ICICI Banks knowledge management (KM) strategy was established in 2000. Backthen, the company was very much smaller than it is now just 1,200 staff comparedto the 30,000 that work for ICICI Bank today.

However, the programme was started at a time when the companys growth wasstarting to go into overdrive. Initially, the organisationdeveloped a broad technology-linked infrastructure, including a corporate intranet, ICICI Universe, intended to

provide a platform where, for instance, employees could check the human resources

(HR) system for vacation entitlements, book days off or view their personal pensiondetails.

By putting these simple, but necessary activities on the intranet, it encouragedemployees to get familiar with using web-based applications, to overcome any fear oftechnology as well as providing them with a good reason for using the portal on aregular basis.


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What began more as an idea and less as a project, was simply the belief that staffshould have a space on the intranet where they could participate in collaborativeactivities, such as contribute or find documents, engage in discussions and post oranswer queries. That idea, in essence, first converted the bank to KM.

Initially, the organisation was motivated to act due to the upheaval caused by the tail-end of the dot-com boom, which was depriving the bank of many good staff as theyleft in significant numbers to join dot-com start-ups taking their knowledge andknow-how with them. We therefore developed WiseGuy, ICICIs KM intranet portal

easily accessible from the main staff portal to provide a way of capturing anddisseminating the knowledge of departing staff.

To develop WiseGuy, a team was put together encompassing KM, HR, technologyand research with a brief to just do it. Indeed they did and a beta version was readywithin just three months.

Before the year was out, faced with the prospect of a reverse merger of ICICI Bankwith its parent ICICI, which went through in 2002, the KM team had to restructure tomeet the needs of the new corporate entity. Some issues articulated at the timeincluded:

1. How to connect this vast new pool of employees with each other;2. How to share business-related information about clients, deals and ideas;3. How to manage staff through the change process via communication,

messages, channels and so on;

4. How to overcome the problems caused by staff turnover;5. How to ensure that every person in the company is adequately equipped with

the skills and training required for their jobs and for lifelong learning anddevelopment.

The deeper question was, quite simply, how do we create a hunger among staff toacquire and share knowledge? That is to say, how do we create the culture? The aimwas to ensure that employees stayed permanently aware of the external competitivechallenges of the business, and to persuade them to remain constantly open to newthoughts, ideas and ways of working.

Satisfied users

In our view, employee satisfaction drives usage and we wanted to use this as thedelivery vehicle to support three major information-handlingbehaviours: sharing,collaboration and self-help. In essence, the workplace is no longer just a physical


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location. It has become a blend of physical and virtual spaces in which work isundertaken.

The KM programme is now deeply embedded in the bank, but not as a result of anydirective from top management. Employees work with the KM programme because

they see its benefits and realise the value it brings to them on a day-to-day basis. Thisis what makes it vibrant and engaging.

It is significant that a small project originally designed for about 1,200 employees infew locations has been flexible and scalable enough to cater for more than 30,000employees in more than 600 locations, most of whom are customer-facing staff.

Everything they need should be at their fingertips, whether getting an answer to aproblem, checking a policy or accessing standard templates and formats such asletters, agreements or guidelines.

The importance of scalability cannot be underestimated. In 2005, usage increasedmore than six times compared to the year before and the portal marked a record one-million logins in November 2004 after the site was redesigned. The number of staffusing the KM portal doubled in the same period.

On average today, about 6,000 users visit the site daily, of which 95 per cent comefrom ICICI Banks retail branches. And more than 40 business divisions actively

participate in the KM effort to contribute and publish content. Today, there are morethan 14,000 individual items, about 1,000 daily searches for information and more

than 16,000 interactive postings.

The WiseGuy KM portal also encompasses a variety of sections including: documentmanagement; news inside and outside the organisation; digital resources such as tradeand news journals, research reports, maps, directories, currency and time calculators;information on the various business groups and group companies, complete employeeinformation; and, interactive sections such as discussion forums, query boards, bookreviews, online quizzes, the rewards and recognition scheme, and so on.

Wise Wednesdays

Early on, we realised that several senior people were reluctant to type and postsubmissions to the portal. So we invited them to share their tacit knowledge in aninformal manner and the WiseGuy Knowledge Leader Series (KLS) was born.

Guest speakers included experts on various topics, such as advanced finance, andinternal business heads who were delighted to be invited and were willing to give it a


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try. KLS evolved to include even chief the financial officers and CEOs of renownedcompanies in India, who have spoken on the topics of leadership and strategy.

Called Wise Wednesdays, we have conducted more than 60 KLS in various formatsover a period of three years from 2001 to 2004. It contributed immensely to

our WiseGuy brand and really helped to build the popularity of KM in ICICI Bankand, overall, gave our KM efforts huge visibility.

In another experiment, we set aside some time once a week for a knowledge caf inthe canteen of our Mumbai headquarters. Similarly, we tried a variety of otherformats, including informal brown bag concepts, in which staff would be invited to

bring their lunch along to a presentation on a particular subject by a notableindividual, to web conferences and live webcasts, so that any user in any locationcould participate. KLS encouraged face-to-face, live interaction and KM wastherefore not seen purely as a portal activity.

Not all of these were successful. For example, our knowledge cafes had to beabandoned because the noise in the canteen proved too distracting, while some of ourspeakers for the brown-bag presentations felt offended that staff were tucking intotheir lunches while they were presenting about weighty topics.

Corporate learning

The ability to learn across the group and from team mates is a very powerful tool. Weaim to build a learning environment by encouraging collaboration and push

mechanisms, including a webzine e-mail to every employee before 9.30am. The DailyDose, as it is called, is a summary of what is new in the outside world and on the

portal. It features headlines, opinions, polls, happenings, customer appreciations,newsletters and other regular updates.

Again, one of the main benefits of the Daily Dose is the high profile it lends to ourvarious KM initiatives. When we polled staff, almost 97 per cent said that The DailyDose represents an important part of their working day. By delivering it direct to theirmailbox, it helps the KM team to capture the mind space of employees as soon asthey sit down to work in the morning.

Other tools we use include Newsroom, a space on the intranet where daily newsheadlines are published. Here, staff can look up all the newsletters published byinternal business groups, media releases, as well as tracking what our competitors areup to. Then there are K-mailers, which are short, one-page reviews on any one of 33topics in six categories; internal newsletters from various domain specialists; online


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quizzes; word power articles or glossaries; training modules; and, a whole library ofonline research tools.

Query Board, a central, interactive frequently asked questions repository by and forstaff, is where they can post any work-related queries, such as the number

of cheques that can be deposited at any one time, customer creditquestions, cheque returns and so on.

Indeed, anything work-related that demands authoritative responses from colleaguesand in-house experts. It serves as the fastest and most reliable source for feedback onqueries or doubts related to workplace rules, policies and procedures, technical know-how and much more. Remarkably, the average response time to a query ranges fromfive to 15 minutes, but never more than one day from the time the query was posted.

In addition to Query Board, we also offer a more general discussion forum on the

intranet where staff can talk about finance, business and economy-related topics.Discussions on our forum revolve around topics highly relevant to the work in the

bank, such as the automatic chequebook re-order system and solutions for detectingfake bank notes.

Managing documents on WiseGuy

The digital assets on WiseGuy represent a vital element of ourKM programme. WiseGuys document-management system offers a managed viewinto otherwise overwhelming enterprise content and provides users access

to personalised content with team-specific interfaces to improve collaboration.

Centralised and distributed publishing capabilities mean that users are empowered andcan contribute their own documents, define them, schedule updates and so on.Furthermore, the portal manager enables business groups to generate their owntemplate-based, database-driven mini-websites using an extremely flexible front end,

point-and-click tool.

The content is classified and organised by use of a simple tree view for easynavigation, supplemented by a search tool for easy retrieval. Information can be

located within two or three clicks, or less than a minute of searching. Other keyfeatures include easy identification of documents by author, date, posted commentsand even queries.

The system helps to preserve the organisations intellectual capital, as it is able tocapture information so that it is not lost even when a person leaves the organisation.To encourage participation, sticky features on the portal include opinion polls,


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cartoons, tips, word of the day and tools available to business teams to conductsurveys and online quizzes.

Technology platforms

Much of what is deployed to support our various KM initiatives is custom-developed,but the tools are supported on a variety of standard hardware and software platforms,particularly Microsoft Windows, Linux, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice (the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office), and a host of other off-the-shelf and customapplications.

Implementation was eased by the fact that it was not one single mega project, but acombination of many experiments and modular launches. This means that we nurturedwhat worked and discarded along the way any elements that plainly did not work.

One early project was a Yellow Pages-style directory for the entire corporate group.These, of course, are quite common KM tools, helping put staff in direct contact withone another. The result, Peoplefinder, is the experts directory that employees use tolocate others and update their own profile with interests, areas of expertise where theycan help colleagues and other relevant information. Creating it was like opening thedoors and windows in a dusty house shut for many months as people who did not evenknow who was sitting on the same floor as them suddenly got connected and itcontinues to be one of the most-used sections.

Many implementations began as line-of-business pilots. At your Service is one such

example in which employees who are also customers of the bank can talk directlywith the product and process teams for personal banking issues. With a back-end

plug-in to the call centre it serves the dual purpose of learning while solvingproblems. It was so effective that it was replicated for other teams too.

Compliance, quality and customer service

In 2002, the bank launched its quality programme to achieve the relevant certificationlevels throughout the organisation. Naturally, KMs role was to support the qualityteam and we did this by building a KM mini-portal on quality. This quality portlet

maintains the background material, documents on Six Sigma methodology,international quality standards, certifications and everything else that relates totheorganisations endeavours in maintaining quality levels. Staff can also post andrespond to queries and interact with the quality experts.

KM tools and techniques are also deployed so that customer-service teams and thosestaff who deal directly with the public can share almost everything related to customer


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complaints and service quality issues, from branch and customer satisfaction withcash machines, to standard templates, letters, tools, to recognising and celebratingcustomer satisfaction benchmarks and people who have achieved it. The variousactivities, contributions and postings help spread the good practices throughout the

bank.

Of course, banks today have to deal with growing regulatory demands, includingcirculars and notices from the regulatory authorities that must be followed to theletter. We therefore created E-Circulars to inform and educate staff on regulatory andcompliance matters. It is used by designated senior managers who have a duty toinform employees on guidelines issued by various regulatory authorities as they affectthe banks policies, products and processes. It is not all one-way. Recipients can also

be tested with four or five key questions to ensure that they broadly understand thecontent.

Beyond the surface to the soul

This is a phrase from a very useful book on the topic. It states that KM is not just a setof techniques or practices. If that were so, it would not have been difficult for othermanufacturers to copy the Toyota Production System, for example, even though thedetails have been relayed in books and Toyota even gives tours of its manufacturingfacilities it is no secret. The difference is in its philosophy and perspective aboutsuch things as people, processes, quality, continuous improvement and other factorsthat represents not just the surface what you can see but the inner soul.

This has become increasingly relevant with the realisation that few jobs are wellstructured or well defined. Instead, knowledge work is defined at the point of need bythe issues, problems or opportunities that arise. Researchers and authors Pfeffer andSutton asked why it was that with so much education and research, managementconsulting, books and articles, that the little change that does occur often happenswith such great difficulty. They concluded it was because knowledge of what needs to

be done frequently fails to result in action or behaviour consistent with thatknowledge.

This is what they called the knowing-doing gap. Their study analysed howsome organisations are consistently able to turn knowledge into action while othersfail. Their findings suggest that it is management practices that either create or reducethe knowing-doing gap. In our work, the KM team used their insights as a guiding

philosophy.

Rather than waiting for culture to change, we banked on change impacting the culture.We tried to make it fun and prestigious and persuaded leaders to champion our KM


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efforts. In experimenting with so many new things and new ways of doing old things,risk taking was encouraged and mistakes were not considered fatal.

Marketing, it is frequently said, is absolutely key to encouraging the use of KMsystems. At ICICI Bank, employees are encouraged to participate and contribute by

way of rewards and recognition. First, the very fact that contributions are published onthe portal along with ownership details gives employees a sense of recognition foreverything they do.

Every contributor earns K-Points for contributing anything from an article todocuments, queries, responses to queries, initiating a discussion and even just ratingdiscussions. A separate section on the intranet is dedicated to the knowledgechampions, displaying the top contributors based on their knowledge quotient. ThisKQ is also prominently displayed on their home page next to a personalised welcomemessage. K-Cash, an earlier version of the rewards scheme, enabled employees to

redeem gift vouchers online for the points they earned. And knowledge leaders whospoke in the Knowledge Leader Series, as well as knowledge champions, were givencertificates signed by the managing director and CEO of the bank.

Marketing KM, we found, is all about making connections, so we didnt hold back.Early on, we moved to win over senior management to help us evangelise our work.Then there were mailers, posters, group presentations, off-site meetings, open housesessions on KM, regular publishing on the portal, surveys, a KM newsletter, even

bare-faced gimmicks. When, for instance, WiseGuy completed its first year,employees who logged on to their machines in the morning were surprised by a short40-second video embedded in an e-mail with bank director Chanda Kochar delivering

a message on the value of KM, congratulating them and urging them to use it more. Ithad the whole company talking about it for days and successfully generated furtherinterest in KM at ICICI Bank. However, user tools were kept relatively free of catchy,gimmicky names infavour of simple, explanatory terms that explained their purpose.For instance, we eschewed names like Guru, Oracle, Solomon, Answer Point and anynumber of catchy acronyms in favour of the simpler Query Board, Discussion Forumand E-Circulars.

This helped us to stand out from the crowd. Users, we feel, appreciated havingsomething plain vanilla whose purpose they could understand and relate to. The carewe took in marketing was reflected in other ways. For instance, early on the KM teamwould use internal marketing campaigns inspired by topical themes, but this wasstopped when we realised that it would not be relevant to everyone throughout India let alone in London, Moscow and Toronto.


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Challenges

The short history of KM in ICICI Bank has not been plain sailing. Having a directorthrow his weight behind the project certainly provided an initial thrust. It sent a

positive signal across the organisation that the top brass were serious about KM, but it

also ran the risk of being perceived as a pet project or flavour of the month.

While many employees actively use the portal, there are gaps in pockets among mid-level managers. I know best and not invented here attitudes remain a barrier.Knowledge sharing is not tightly linked to staff appraisal and neither are knowledgemanagement activities mentioned in ICICI Banks balanced score card index if itwere, it may be a different matter.

Certain measures can be a double-edged sword. For instance, one team started aninternal initiative in which they asked team members to submit suggestions, linking

their participation to performance indicators and making it a part of an employeesmandatory goals. However, it was soon observed and reported that some staff weretaking ideas from WiseGuy and submitting them to their group system. Such instancesundermine or detract from the overall process and can stoke internal conflict.

From a technical perspective, the KM initiatives have done a better job of capturinginternal and external unstructured information, such as documents and ideas and inharnessing external structured data such as content and databases versus internalstructured data, such as data warehouses, enterprise resource-planning applicationsand databases. Disparate systems can create fatigue and/or confusion among users

about which one to use.

First-generation KM revolved around creating processes to capture, codifyand organise knowledge for retrieval. In second-generation KM, knowledge flows

becomes more important than the knowledge itself. The third generation of KMinvolves easing the creation of new knowledge, innovation andimproving organisational performance. Maturity levels vary according to theapplications within each teams.

At ICICI Bank, the business leadership team, by sponsorship and example, has

outlined principles of action that stipulate that employees must actively shareknowledge and seek out colleagues expertise to solve problems and/or improve

processes. KM at ICICI Bank was started in a non-dictatorial manner and its use isvoluntary, but a programme of this nature cannot be expected to continue onmomentum. But to the average employee in the bank, KM now is no longer strange ora novelty, but has become the way we work.


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So while we build for scale, we design for the soul. The KM team is encouraged to beopen-minded, to bring in outside resources and to avoid being ego-driven to findsolutions within only. When this is done, it is a value arbitrage and a not costarbitrage.

On many occasions it is not about KM strategy, but survival strategy. Simply ensuringthat the proposals and projects see the light of the day, ensuring they are nurtured andsurvive initial skepticism and hiccups.

Finally, it is about speed, about the youth and their energy, about collaboration andco-operation.

Deepa Prabhu is the head of knowledge management at ICICI Bank. She can be

contacted [email protected]

WiseGuy contributions

WiseGuy has assisted the organisation in a number of ways. It has helped:

In the creation of a common storehouse of knowledge; Staff identify sources of in-house expertise; In the development of a sense of belonging among staff; Save the bank money; Improve our employees decision-making ability; Empower staff; Provide a means for staff to upgrade their skills; Staff to plan their career movements; Provide a platform for recognition of contributions made to the bank.

What works

What really continues to work in favour of WiseGuy is the way that it helps to engageemployees. This is the result of the philosophy and management practices and smalldecisions taken on a day-to-day, case-by-case basis. Some insights may be capsulatedas follows:

Listen, listen, listen. Then listen some more;

Speed is of the essence lead, dont follow; Maintain the intrinsic organic nature and growth versus design and diktat; Dont kill any idea however small; Tap the collective energy;
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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Compassion and caring most employees are struggling with personal issuesof work-life balance and stress. If KM helps decrease this, you have a convert;

Sensing underlying concerns; Team work, every time.

km tigers-employee initiatives

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