WHEN THE IDOLS FALL…………………………….

Two fields that give men and women the utmost glamour are sports and cinema. In both, the heroes (the heroines and the villains) have larger than life image. They are recipients of unlimited adulation from public at large. People are willing to wait for hours to see them. A shake hand from them would make anyone’s life. A photograph with them will make a person a celebrity. These are Idols! For people, they are living Gods.

And among these Gods, there stand out certain names for their clean image and fairness. They have unblemished records in their professional and personal lives. The names that immediately come to mind are Amitabh Bachchan, Richard Harrison, Roger Federer, Sachin Tendulkar, Steffi Graf & Tiger Woods. They represent ethics, morale, decency and above all fairness. No doubt, they too are human beings with emotions, but by far, these men and women could balance their lives and emotions and come through very clean to the public. And we adored these champions for not only what they are but also for their qualities. And these men and women are invited by organizations such UN etc to be its Ambassadors for spreading the goodwill around the world.

And then there are names such as Beckham, Ronaldo, Maradona, The khans of Bollywood and the scores of Hollywood stars. All these are very presentable and enigmatic personalities. They too were recipients of unadulterated adulation of the fans. However, these men and women were also famous for their emotions, tantrums and fallibilities. Names of many famous (also infamous) men and women were linked up with them and these names changed very periodically. The Lals and Kumar and Khans and Khannas live a make-believe life where fans and followers of all age, beeline behind them. They get everything on the platter and also in multitudes; to the extent their rejects are more than the accepteds. This leads to one night stands and near-term affairs between the stars and the colleagues/fans/followings. Also, it is to be noted that these stars live long durations away from home and in their professions, they go thru tremendous levels of stress. These affairs temporarily take the stress away. By the time they realize that these were not waterfronts but only ‘mirages’, someone must have blown the whistle and the entire affairs would get the wash in the press, in the media and as gossip around dinner tables.

Coming back to the clean ambassadorial idols, l’affair de Tiger Woods had broken many hearts, for he had such a clean image among the public. Everyone wanted him to win and lead every course. Such was his image that very sensitive and clean corporates such as Omega Watches used him as its brand Ambassador. But lo and behold, the beans are spilled. It is said that he had not one, many affairs outside his marriage and today we watched the TV news of his wife Elin Nordegren consulting divorce lawyers. No sane person would ever have wished this for the Tiger.

What would happen to those people who, attracted by his clean image, with such empathy, had been praying for him to succeed al the time? He had broken their heart, for sure. Of all people, Tiger would be the last man they thought would fall into such traps.

When the idol falls, what happens? The trust is broken, the beliefs go to dogs and life loses its meaning. What else?

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge Management (KM) is defined as the process of creation, capture, organizing, accessing and using knowledge to create customer/user value.

Knowledge and Information

There is a tendency among people to use the word knowledge and information interchangeably as if they are synonymous. Knowledge consists of Truths & beliefs, perspectives & concepts, judgments & expectations, methodologies & know-how. Knowledge is accumulated, organized, integrated and held over long periods. Information consists of facts, figures and data that are organized to describe a particular situation or problem. From the descriptions, it is very evident that knowledge and Information mean different things, though they are related.

The knowledge is of two types; Tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge:

Tacit Knowledge not easily visible or expressible and is highly personable. Subjective insights, intuitions, hunches, gut feeling etc form part of tacit knowledge. It is deeply rooted in an individual’s actions and experience.

Explicit knowledge:

Explicit Knowledge is formal and systematic; which can be expressed in words and numbers; which can be easily communicated and shared. Hard data, scientific formulae, patents, codified procedures, universal principle etc forms part of the explicit knowledge.

The interaction between these two forms of knowledge provides the understanding required for knowledge creation, elicitation and capture

Why knowledge management is required in organizations?

In an intense, open, global and dynamic world environment, new ideas and processes are increasingly becoming focal point of competition. Organizations able to reach the users faster more efficiently with products and services that are well matched with the needs of the consumer benefit from competitive advantage. Thus an organization’s ability to learn and innovate faster than the competition may be the greatest sustainable competitive advantage. This underlines the utmost requirement of knowledge management in organizations & companies.

When does it become necessary to have knowledge management in place?

• When the employees leave, what percentage of knowledge of the organization goes out with them?
• How quickly can expertise be assimilated in a new organization?
• How can organizations reap big returns without reinventing the wheel every time?
• When organizations undergo re-structuring, can it be ensured that the knowledge does not disappear with it?
• When expanding the businesses, can it be done without losing the organizational culture, core values, systems & knowledge?

If these questions frequent in the mind, it is proof that organization severely need knowledge management in place.

Knowledge Management Process:

• Create new knowledge
• Capture tacit knowledge in explicit form (make individual knowledge available across organization)
• Organize knowledge (classify, categorize, store, retrieve & maintain knowledge)
• Access knowledge (making knowledge available to the requester)
• Use knowledge (in work activities, decision making and other opportunities)

Role of Information Technology in Knowledge Management:

Information forms an integral component of Knowledge. Therefore, it is essential to understand the usage of technology in the knowledge management practices. Information technology plays a vital role in capturing, organizing and retrieving and sharing knowledge. IT and the digital nervous system (IT hardware, software, connectivity & applications) has come to stay as the real means of information & knowledge creation, capture, managemnt & sharing. Without IT, Information & knowledge manageent would have stayed at its primitive level. A prime example of this case would the Genome project in which DNA structure was revealed in the ‘book of life’ It was all about concurrent and collaborative research happening in laboratories located in almost all continents being accessed and shared by the scientific community in such a fast pace that the whole project got over successfully almost five years before the scheduled time of its end. And what a breakthrough research it was!

Critical Success Factors in Knowledge Management

• Have a knowledge sharing culture in organization
• Have a proper document management system in place
• Have dedicated knowledge people
• Have a measurement system for KM success.

How to measure the success of KM

It is difficult to measure as it is quite new, but look for trends in:

• Reduction in response time to user queries
• Greater clarity of approach in problem solving
• Reduction in normal innovation cycle and thus time to market
• Saving of labour hours
• Saving of Investment

The successful enterprise of tomorrow will be the one having a proper KM network in place and will be able to put knowledge at the frontiers of innovation and customer service

Myths about KM

• KM should be assigned to a separate Department - Untrue, Everyone in the organization must have a responsibility in promoting KM.
• KM means a good information system -Untrue, Information system is just a tool to ensure success of KM. By itself, it is not KM
• Once initiated, KM will happen automatically- Untrue, KM needs continuous monitoring and nurturing.

Benefits of KM

• Reduction of paper handling and error-prone manual processes
• Reduction of paper storage
• Reduction of lost documents
• Faster access to information
• Online access to information that was formerly available only on paper, microfilm etc
• Improved control over documents and document-oriented processes
• Streamlining of time-consuming business processes
• Security over document access and modification
• Provide reliable and accurate audit trail
• Improved tracking and monitoring, with the ability to identify bottlenecks and modify the system to improve efficiency

Knowledge Management - Benifits to India:

• Better quality of technical education and therefore better employability
• Increase in literary rate of the country
• Bringing health facilities to the rural population
• Improving food production and post production efficiency
• Enormous saving in R&D spending
• Improving national and local governance
• Reduction in poverty, child labour and corruption

Conclusion

Knowledge Management emerged as a scientific discipline in early 90s. It was initially supported by only practitioners mostly in industries. Later, the ideas were taken up by academics and the pioneering institutions were Hitotsubashi University, Japan, Babson College & New York University. In 2001, Thomas Stewart, former editor at Fortune Magazine, published a cover story highlighting the importance of intellectual capital of organizations. Since its establishment, the KM discipline has been gradually moving towards academic maturity. The core components of KM include People, Processes, Culture, Structure & Technology. Varied schools of thought on Knowledge management exists today and once the KM discipline reaches academic maturity, we expect these to converge and then we would see highest levels of its proliferation, thereby bringing tremendous benefits and advantages to the practitioners.

CAT IIM 2009 - THE IIM WAY OF MANAGEMENT !

The Common Admission Test (CAT) for entrance into IIMs for MBA, beginning academic year 2009 had really gone into rough weathers with the online Prometric exam going haywire in almost all centres. Central HRD Minister Kapil Sibal had lambasted the way at which the horrible mistakes had been continuing for the past four days and had ordered an enquiry into the whole affair. The Online exam co-ordinating institute, IIM Ahmedabad’s Director Prof. Sameer Barua had accepted that the selection committee had erred in doing the whole process thru Prometric. The COO of Prometric had put the whole blame to some unknown virus. The passing the buck had started. Finally the villain will be the un-known Virus! The story will end there to everyone’s delight and all will live happily ever after. Only in India will such cases pass!

As a person associated in IT industry for close to 3 decades, I am convinced that the problems are not because of virus but due to capability issues of Prometric company. While it is the king in the Online exam sphere, I am sure the company would not have ever done any such mammoth test as CAT in its history. Without self assessing the capability to do, this huge task, to be done within the time frame and without doing any trial run, the company had fallen down due to the incapability of its systems to handle the load. For everything, now there is a virus to blame! As a tech company, Prometric must be ashamed of itself to blame the virus for the fiasco.

There is another animal behind the story and it is NIIT. Its competencies run in training and not in online examinations. I understand that it is NIIT the lead bidder of the case with infrastructure coming from Prometric. The expectation of success is way off the mark and it had been tested at the expense of hapless students.

Now let me tell you my experience. My daughter was a candidate to write CAT 2009. Her centre was SRM University Chennai. I had promised her to visit her at Chennai and take her to the exam centre which I did today. Her test time scheduled was today afternoon. Though the test starts at 3.30 pm, students were advised to report two hours before schedule which we did promptly. Since one has been reading about the difficulties that Prometric was facing from the d day, I have been following newspapers, CAT IIM web site, Prometric Website and their contact points about any change in the exam schedule. Having not seen or heard anything adversary only did I take the train from Cochin to Chennai to take my daughter to the test site.

Little did we anticipate that we were in for trouble! There were three batches of fifty students each to undergo the test. Two batches were admitted and the third batch was asked to wait. Wait they did endlessly. After about two hours, a person by name Albert Joseph, who claimed to be centre in-charge, called these waiting students and told them hat they had earlier sent s m s & email to these students about rescheduling their exams. It was an out and out lie. Had that been the case, the students should have been told so at the time they reported. The fact is that none of the students had received any s m s or email. At quarter to four PM they were asked to leave by being told that they would be informed the new schedule in the due course. Needless to add, my daughter was one of them.

I was standing aside watching the whole show. This person Albert, had no remorse about telling the hapless students to go way and expect for another communication. In fact he was full of arrogance and showing it off on the anxious students who were numb with shock. Just see this, in my daughters case she had bunked the regular studies to attend the test. The centre is located close to fifty kilometers away from the city. The frustrating experience could have added its own negative impact on the mind. I am sure it would be the same with all the affected students. When I went to talk to the centre in-charge, he avoided me totally telling that he has nothing to do with the parents!

Who is bothered in this country? The ministers, the educationalists or the academicians? No one! It is just another fiasco. That’s it. They are so used to such mess-ups. Everyone will simply pass the blame on others.

The famous IIMs again had proven that they are good at theory and not the practice. If they really were good at the practice, they definitely should not have let this happen. And let it continue for four succeeding days! How can anyone decide the whole online thing without ever testing it? The NIIT and the Prometric had over shown its capabilities to misguide the decision makers. Thus the first ever online CAT had turned into a huge failure with aspiring candidates all over the country suffering!

What do we call this fiasco? The ‘IIM way of Management’? You would all laugh I am sure, but I cannot, for I am an affected parent.