Sparsh Infosys Case Study

The interest in a knowledge management program within the organization began as early as 1985. Although, it was in the year 1992, when the company began its first initiative of a knowledge management system knowns as the “bodies of knowledge” or the BOKs. These BOKs were the first explicit hard documentation of an Infosys employee’s on-the-job experience. In 1996, when the use of Internet became more prominent, a company-wide Intranet was launched in the name of “Sparsh”, in Sanskrit meaning “in touch”. With this, BOKs became online records. As the company grew further, locating information became a challenge, thus in 1997, a directory, called the “People-Knowledge Map” was created on the Sparsh (Kaur). This facilitated an easier access to contact information and allowed colleagues to consult with one another for advice. Further developments in technology, allowed the …show more content…
One of the primary issues with any knowledge management system is encouraging employees to contribute. Similarly, “less than 5 percent of employees had made any form of contribution, and even fewer has used the information the system contained” (C. Kimble) by the end of 2000. Another concern with its KMS was that when people did contribute to the KShop, many of the items were repetitive, out of date or of little use. Moreover, when the company tried to incentivize the process, those in charge or reviewing the knowledge assets complained of being overwhelmed and many employees decided to contribute “for the joy of sharing” (Garud and Kumaraswamy) and were primarily motivated for the rewards. A third challenge for the company was that as the KShop grew, the number of categories grew. There was no clear organization that allowed different employees at Infosys to locate what exactly they were looking for, this would lead to inefficiency in knowledge transfers and time