Initiative to share information, ideas

By K.Satyamurty

BANGALORE, JULY 12. The Bangalore-headquartered i-flex Solutions Ltd., which specialises in financial and banking software, has implemented a new initiative for its employees to share information and ideas.

The company has launched its "KForum" as this knowledge-sharing initiative is called, on its i-CLEAR platform, which is its knowledge repository tool. Every employee will have access to relevant information in the KForum, Mr Thomas Mathew, Senior Consultant at i-flex told The Hindu. The aim was to build up an efficient and effective communication channel that would help the KForum members to publish and disseminate information, interact easily and effectively, and create a professional environment that would enhance both individual and organisational knowledge.

He said the KForum was built on the premise that there should be a consistent access to a steady stream of information, cutting across groups and locations, which this would help the organisation amass vibrant information-sharing "communities" in areas of specific interest. The KForums are created for mission- critical Knowledge Management (KM) areas with adequate budgets and infrastructure.

The KM initiative and KForums are considered to be important in the background of 30 per cent of jobs created in the U.S. in the last five years in the IT industry and 40 per cent of the U.S. economy-a result of KM in the form of Intellectual Property. Nearly 80 per cent of the assets owned by top companies were in an intangible form and 75 per cent of all organisations that ignored KM strategies encountered additional forms of dysfunction. KM was not another fad and corporates were beginning to realise that better knowledge management was a core competency for survival in the information age, Mr Mathew said.

After several trials, i-flex had decided on the i-CLEAR platform based on client/server architecture, ASP and Java based. This platform had extremely fine-grained access control, user, role, group and project-based security along with monitoring and tracking capabilities. Factors taken into account during the implementation phase were the need to understand today's technology environment and needs and aspiration of the company's employees, to identify critical business areas that needed to be mapped into KM initiatives and to create a benchmark for measurement.

The KM concept had evolved from underatanding the fact every organisation had a wealth of knowledge. This knowledge could exist as explicit knowledge in the form of a databank, repositories or directories. Such explicit knowledge was available to all those who had access within the organisation. In addition, there was individual knowledge existing in the form of tacit knowledge that could reach full potential only if converted into organisational knowledge. In KM, both explicit and tacit knowledge were harnessed to the maximum for enhancing the overall competitive nature of an organisation, Mr. Mathew said.

Sharing knowledge was equally important within the organisation. Most of the time, knowledge-sharing occurred inadvertently, and failed to focus on the task at hand. Knowledge was also an entity that conitinuously dimished in value. People should constantly replenish and update what they had learned. A knowledge firm should have the means to overcome such challenges, and this was what the KForum initiative took care of.

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