Leveraging Knowledge Management For Growth: A Case Study of Tata Consultancy Services

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Leveraging Knowledge Management for Growth: A Case Study of Tata

Consultancy Services
Article in Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research · October 2007

DOI: 10.1080/15228053.2007.10856123
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Leveraging Knowledge Management for Growth:
A Case Study of Tata Consultancy Services
Ravi S Sharma
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Aijaz Siddiqui, Atul Sharma, Rajdeep Singh, Ravi Kumar, Sachin Kaushal,
Siddhartha Banerjee
SP Jain Institute of Management, Singapore & Dubai.
Abstract
This case study is a review of knowledge management practices at Tata Consultancy Services –
an increasingly global IT consulting firm headquartered in Mumbai – which has enabled it to
meet ambitious growth targets over the past 5 years. The case also narrates some of the
continuing challenges that confront TCS and the potential risks pertaining to leveraging
knowledge capital. The authors collaborated on this case in order to develop learning insights
on knowledge management in practice at global leaders across industries. While open-ended in
its conclusions, this case does reveal some of the dilemmas faced by strategic management in
adopting a suitable KM strategy for sustainable growth.
Keywords – growth strategy, learning organization, knowledge management, knowledge

audit, knowledge management strategy, knowledge strategy, knowledge transfer
Prologue
Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) has emerged as India’s largest IT company and Asia’s
largest independent software and service organization. TCS reported consolidated revenues of
US $4.3 Billion in the fiscal year 2007 (Please refer to Exhibit I) with the vision of growth being
a place in the global top ten IT enterprises in terms of revenues by the year 2010 (Please refer to
Exhibit II) from its current position of 231. It is important in a marketplace where size and global
presence matters in order to service US100 billion dollar multi-national organizations. However,
in order to fulfill its vision, TCS must continue with its “disruptive growth” of at least 35% year
to year (Datta, 2007) – a target it has met ever since it went public in 2004. This case study seeks
to understand whether sound knowledge management strategy and its pragmatic implementation
can help TCS in its vision.
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A recent Business Week report ranks TCS as one of the ten most profitable ICT companies in the world
with a 41% growth in revenues to USD 4.3 billion for the financial year ending 31-Mar-07 and a 46%
return on equity.
Leveraging KM for Growth
S Ramadorai (CEO) and N Chandrasekaran (EVP - Global Sales and Operations) were
exuberant when TCS received the Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) Award at the
Asia Pacific regional level for the second time, repeating a 2005 achievement. As the MAKE
citation suggested, being a global IT consulting leader, TCS’s continuing prime concern is
knowledge management (KM) and the retention and exploitation of its knowledge capital in order
to engineer some of the most complex IT applications and infrastructure seen anywhere in the
world (Gupta 2006). TCS had envisioned and pioneered the adoption of flexible global business
practices (such as its Global Network Delivery Model which attempts to replicate and seamlessly
connect virtual project teams across the globe) in order to meet the software service needs of its
customers worldwide and some of these efforts are already bearing results.
TCS has a global footprint with over 104, 347 professionals in more than one fifty offices
in more than fifty countries (Please refer to Exhibit III and V). It has broadened TCS’ software
operations by setting up software development centers in other talent-surplus geographies such as
China, Brazil and Uruguay in addition to having a large number at home in India. TCS derives
more than 63% of its revenues from the high-growth and lucrative sectors of Banking, Financial
Services and Insurance (BFSI), Telecom and Manufacturing (Please refer to Exhibit IV). TCS
particularly has an edge over its domestic competitors in terms of the larger deals in the
applications development and maintenance (ADM) segment of the IT outsourcing market –
though it is currently down from 51.5% to 48.6%. As part of its business strategy, TCS is
focusing on higher value business process outsourcing (BPO) as a source of sustainable growth,
which has grown from 5.9% to 6.2% (Please refer Exhibit IV).
In order to fuel the targeted growth, TCS has embarked on organic as well as
acquisitions-based development. Retired Commodore Dilip Mohapatra (Global Head of Learning
& Development at TCS) and Mr. A. Srinivasan (Vice President- Corporate KM), the responsible
managers for formulating TCS’s knowledge strategy-believe that there is a trade-off between
organic growth (with its emphasis on training and retention) and corporate acquisitions (with its
focus on rapid entry into a market with ready-to-deploy resources) which will be a recurrent
theme in TCS’s foreseeable future. Its strong domestic position ensures a stable base of highly
capable IT professionals with a formidable absorptive capacity for further learning and
development. At the same time, the organisation is exposed to cultural, integration and employee
retention challenges associated with acquisitions. TCS is thus constantly working towards
exploiting its vast intellectual capital through its Research & Development (R&D) group arm led
by Professor Mathai Joseph - a distinguished UK academic who chose to return to India to drive
TCS’s innovation with partnerships, startups and in-house creativity that can be leveraged for
growth - what Mr Ramadorai calls the “collaborative innovation” that will “power TCS” (Datta
2007).
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Commodore Mohapatra and Professor Joseph have plenty to be satisfied with – TCS’s
growth has been driven by what economists call total factor productivity – productivity that is
value-added in that it goes beyond investments (Senge 1999). The corporate L&D and the R&D
programs have enabled TCS’s innovation in the development of in-house CASE tools and
products that has allowed it to compete against its bigger, more established international rivals.
Even in the ADM space, TCS has moved up the value chain from fixing COBOL code in 1980 to
developing CASE tools and applications never created before anywhere in the world. Hence,
TCS has shown its prowess in both exploring as well as exploiting knowledge for competitive
advantage – a hallmark of great knowledge creating companies as suggested by Nonaka &
Takeuchi (1995).
Industry Background and the Growth of TCS
In the wider context, India has established itself as a top-notch offshore destination for IT
and BPO services over the past decade or more and continues to gobble up ever-larger bites of the
estimated US$1.5 trillion global market for technology and related services (Velloor 2007). The
National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the premier trade body
and the chamber of commerce for the IT software and services industry in India, estimated that
India exports US$18 billion worth of IT services annually, employs 1.6 million IT engineers and
contributes a significant 28 per cent to the total talent pool of knowledge workers globally; this
despite an anticipated skill shortage of 500,000 knowledge workers by 2010. In a September 2006
report, Morgan Stanley ranked TCS, Infosys and Wipro as among the world’s largest IT services
providers in terms of market capitalization.
India started gaining recognition in the global software marketplace due to the IT
proliferation in the early eighties when young information technology graduates migrated to the
United States for work or graduate school in large numbers and found reasons for returning in the
late 1990s – bringing back key technical skills, market knowledge and business relationships.
Hence, the Indian software industry as a whole received a boost for high quality service delivery,
which gained international recognition for its competence and skills. The inclusive Indian culture
and work ethic also fostered this transference of skills and expertise through social networks of
coaching, mentoring and learning akin to the guru-pupilage system of yore.
Domestically, the Rajiv Gandhi government introduced a myriad of IT enabled services

in the country, giving birth to a new generation of up-stream technology-driven industries or
technology-supported industries. The major Indian initiative in R&D in the Information
Communications Technology (ICT) sector created a “can do” belief amongst Indian engineers
that they could design world-class services and products. The likes of Texas Instruments, Intel,
Siemens, Sun Microsystems made early forays into (and around) Bangalore, India, co-locating
with the likes of Wipro, Infosys and Satyam. The rest, as analysts say, is history. From the onset,
Indian IT companies consistently emphasized on continuous R&D efforts and innovation for
organic growth and started meeting global standards by producing and reinventing their products
and services to compete in the fiercely price-sensitive yet quality-adhering market place.
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Hence, around the time of the Year 2000 (Y2K) challenge, India emerged as one of the
main offshore destinations in the world for outsourcing as “advanced economies” relegated the
tasks of fixing unwieldy COBOL, FORTRAN and C codes to Indian software engineers. This, in
hindsight, proved to be a prescient training ground for what was to come. Though generally
spurred by the cost reduction factor, Indian IT services companies also offered value addition by
improving productivity and quality. The competitive advantage lay in the scalability of the major
players, their strong focus on learning and growth and their considerable experience in delivering
a wide range of services.
Indian software service vendors have since then developed more of a global service
delivery capability than their competitors develop. India's workforce offers the largest pool of
technical skills in the world, and the country's universities add 300,000 engineering graduates to
its ranks annually. Despite the industry average 25% attrition rates (due to turnover caused by the
scarcity of supply), Indian IT companies have largely adapted their Human Capital policies
(recruiting, training, retaining, and replication) that have resulted in net growth in the talent pools.
Against this backdrop, TCS has had an interesting journey since its inception in 1968 as a
privately held subsidiary of the Tata Group (one of India’s oldest and most established business
house) and subsequent listing on the Bombay Stock Exchange in 2004. Today TCS has gained an
international reputation by establishing itself globally and becoming the first Indian IT company
to achieve a revenue of over US$ 4 billion. It is a part of one of Asia's most respected
conglomerates - the Tata Group - which, with its interests in Energy, Telecommunications,
Financial Services, Chemicals, Engineering and Materials, provides it with a grounded
understanding of specific business challenges facing global companies.
Key Business Challenges
The key business challenge facing TCS is the pursuit of all sustainable paths to growth
that would contribute to expanding the business by a third each year. The IT services
marketplace is truly dynamic. Dossani and Kenny (2004) suggested that TCS should move up the
value chain, with bigger deals and higher value BPO and consulting projects. This remains true
though two of the other strategic questions that they posed have since become dated; specifically:
1. Should TCS enter the BPO segment of the market or it should remain an
overwhelmingly ADM player?
2. Should TCS grow by mergers and acquisitions (M&A) or continue with its
predominantly organic increase in headcount?
In the current environment, it is intuitively obvious to the management of TCS that there is no
choice but to pursue all feasible growth avenues.
4
Messrs Ramadorai and Chandrasekaran clearly believe that a larger deal strategy – such
as pursuing 10 big deals in the next 5 to 10 years in the US$50-100 million range (cf. Datta 2007
for a table of TCS’s recent wins) – is a more effective way to sustain high growth than simply
increasing billing rates or inducing customer spend with greater pre-sales activities. This is
particularly true when viewed in the context of revenue per client as well as billing rates where
TCS lags both Infosys and Wipro (op. cit.). In other words, simply increasing billing rates or
inducing greater customer spend (mostly in US $) may not be an option to offset increasing
personnel and retention costs as well as meet growth targets, particularly given the slide in the US
dollar in the 3rd quarter of 2007. It is simplistic to attribute this to a “visibility lag” or brand
recognition as some may suggest. The Tata Group is neither a new entrant nor without massive
marketing muscle.
One of the major challenges for TCS is to ‘co-create’ capability which takes advantage of
existing knowledge to grow new capabilities. The prevailing belief is that excellence has to be
replicated throughout TCS through continuous knowledge sharing and organic growth. The high
attrition rate in the IT industry has been an obvious challenge for all the IT companies in India,
and despite being acknowledged as having the industry’s lowest attrition (Datta 2007), this talent
leakage continues to require management attention. Moreover, several analysts have begun to
question the revenue–headcount equation: that is, whether increasing the number of delivery
professionals can continually increase revenues and profits without any diminishing returns. To
illustrate, from Exhibits V it is apparent that TCS’s headcount over the past 6 years is increasing
and up to Quarter 2 FY 2008 reached 104, 347. While this improvement is observable, it
nevertheless lags TCS’ major competitors IBM Global Services, Infosys and Satyam (Dossani
and Kenney, 2004). Though the pricing environment is good and TCS routinely charges 10%
higher with new clients (Velloor 2007), higher personnel costs are putting a larger squeeze on
margins. TCS is therefore in need of a non-linear model that de-links pricing from personnel
costs, perhaps leveraging knowledge as a resource to greater effect.
Besides the competitive compensation and incentives that are employed, TCS currently
deploys innovative practices that promote horizontal and vertical job enrichment. This not only
improves productivity but also helps control attrition rate. One such scheme is the “science to
software” program which recruits fresh science graduates and trains them into “best in class” IT
professionals, using their already established strengths in logic, reasoning and rigour, in order to
develop skills in technology, process and management. Such ingrained flexibility also prepares
these professionals for a culture of change, development and learning.
M&A has now emerged as an important mode of growth for several Indian business
houses typically accustomed to organic growth on account of India’s large talent pool. TCS
recently acquired a 75-percent stake in Switzerland based TKS-Teknosoft SA for Swiss Franc
100.5 million (around USD 80 million). There have also been smaller acquisitions in South
America and Eastern Europe. This has helped TCS to scale up its business in Europe enabling
direct access to clients in Switzerland and France. In a typical IT services acquisition, there is a
smaller proportion of physical assets and a much higher proportion of knowledge assets, as
compared to a manufacturing scenario. Therefore, a careful analysis of knowledge assets, their
assimilation and re-usability gains critical importance.
5
Approaches to Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management (KM) refers to a range of practices and techniques used by

organizations to exploit their knowledge capital. KM helps in building know-how, expertise and
intellectual capital for leveraging, reusing and transferring knowledge and learning across the
organization. The management of TCS recognizes that this is a core initiative, which is driven by
the need to meet organization goals. The challenge is hence to move these initiatives in parallel
with business strategies (please refer to Exhibit XI).
KM is an evolving discipline and TCS has been an early adopter. Knowledge transfer (a
critical aspect of KM) has always existed in one form or the other within TCS in situations such
as on-the-job discussions with peers, apprenticeship, and maintenance of corporate libraries,
professional training and mentoring programs, knowledge base technologies, expert systems and
knowledge repositories. KM programs are also closely related to organizational learning
initiatives – the processes by which an organization learns to share best practices and avoid
repeating mistakes. Such learning distinguished through its focus on the management of specific
knowledge assets, development and cultivation of channels through which knowledge flows. The
key to success in such initiatives is typically the transformation of Human Knowledge Capital
(mostly tacit knowledge residing in experts) into Structural Knowledge Capital (repositories and
business processes including inculcating norms such as coaching and mentoring).
At yet another layer of abstraction, as the processes of the knowledge life cycle (for
example – Birkinshaw and Sheehan’s (2002) creation, transfer and re-use) continue ad infinitum
within an organisation, two types of knowledge flow through – explicit (that is, codifiable) and
implicit or tacit (not codifiable but residing as expertise in the minds of knowledge workers). In
other words, explicit knowledge can be well articulated (especially in the written form) while
tacit knowledge is retained by people who possess a certain level of expertise in a given domain.
While Professor Ikujiro Nonaka of the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and
his co-workers (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) were not the first to popularise these terms, their
work nonetheless pointed to the stark differences in which the two types of knowledge are
created, captured, organised, stored, searched and transferred for re-use. Hansen et al. (1999)
concluded that while explicit knowledge sharing (which they defined as codification) comprise
the majority (in terms of knowledge transactions), most value was derived from tacit knowledge
sharing (that they called personalisation). They further suggested that superior IT infrastructure
such as web portals and wireless LANs were only suited for codification; personalisation requires
opportunities for both traditional as well as IT-based communication and collaboration. With its
emphasis on bigger deals and BPO, TCS’s KM practices have evolved from being predominantly
codified to increasingly personalised.
6
Several scholars have addressed other challenges facing the sharing of knowledge within
an organization. Choo & Brontis (2002) have suggested that the dilemma of balancing
knowledge exploration (discovering and creating knowledge for driving core business ahead of
the competition) and knowledge exploitation (leveraging existing knowledge to derive
competitive advantage) is a fundamental one that confronts all knowledge-intensive firms.
Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) pioneered the requirement of a shared ba or workspace that will
facilitate knowledge sharing across the organisation. Zack (1999), in an empirical study of
knowledge strategies in over 20 knowledge-intensive firms, concluded that the misalignment of
business and knowledge strategies was a fairly common cause for poor performance – for
example, businesses that did not know when value was being created and did not organise
themselves to continually exploit this value. Gupta and Govinderajan (2000) performed a more
extensive field investigation of knowledge flows within multinational corporations and found that
the mismatch between the source and target of knowledge flows - for example, if knowledge
transfer is not done appropriately - led to severe ineffectiveness. Hence, the fundamental
motivation for building a KM platform is the realization that knowledge is of little value unless it
can be shared and re-used (as opposed to re-discovered) when opportunities for exploitation arise.
In closing, KM brings under one roof for TCS, some of the major considerations for driving
higher value and greater revenues per employee are:
• Creating knowledge content and building on existing products and services
• Achieving shorter newer service development cycles
• Facilitating management of organizational innovation
• Leveraging the expertise of people across the organization
• Benefiting from 'network effects' of increasing the quality of knowledge sharing
• Managing proliferation of data and information in complex business environments
• Allowing IT consultants to access useful and relevant knowledge resources and best
practice guidelines
• Facilitating organizational learning
• Managing intellectual capital and intellectual assets in the workforce as individuals
leave the organization and new ones join
• Bringing to bear TCS’s best thinking on virtually any business problem such as loss in
market share, declining profits or consultant inefficiency
TCS’s current KM Strategy
Early in its corporate growth, the management of TCS saw the need to inculcate aspects
of KM within the organization culture – aspects such as explicit documentation, creation of
templates, coaching and mentoring, egoless project teams, and process-driven practices. Today’s
attrition and acquisitions climate makes it an even more acute challenge to train and indoctrinate
close to half of TCS’s consultants who would have been with the company for less than 3 years
(please refer to Exhibit VI), to conform to a collaborative, cooperative knowledge sharing culture.
Ideally, all organizational knowledge would be accessed and captured at three stages - before,
during or after project activities. Consultants undertaking a new project could “hit the ground
running” with knowledge resources (both explicit as well as tacit) on an enterprise portal which
7
would allow them to learn best practices and lessons learnt for similar projects and have access to
relevant resources during the project to seek expert guidance on issues such as implementation
actions and review activities. As well, in pre-sales and sales activities, senior practice executives
would draw on the benefit of past collaterals, client engagements and mock-ups of deliveries in
order to demonstrate TCS competence and proof-of-concept.
In the TCS context, KM offered systems, repositories, and corporate processes to

encourage and formalize such activities. Similarly, new knowledge could be created by
combining existing knowledge assets from multiple sources before project implementation.
Lessons learned during a project often led to after-action-reviews, which led to further insights
for the future. The apparent learning paradox between knowledge exploration and exploitation
(that is, the seemingly incompatible efforts at discovering new knowledge versus repeatedly re-
using existing knowledge) is avoided by the organization.
TCS also felt that in order to compete with small niche segment players, it is important
that big players in the market divide into smaller strategic segments. The resulting heterogeneity
in service offerings is due to different market conditions, practices and technological alignment of
a particular industry or business. KM hence works like a bridge across heterogeneities that may
be customized to fit the local demand.
TCS has also leveraged its partnerships with key vendors in several implementations and
customizations with its clients thus helping TCS’s customers strategically align themselves for
growth and diversification across sectors. Since TCS has use KM, from the onset, as a means of
de-linking headcount from revenue and creating conditions for non-linear growth, the onus was
on operational managers to deliver on this value proposition.
Since TCS provides KM services to its clients (a practice headed by Anand Rao, a
debonair and cosmopolitan 20-year industry veteran), its KM philosophy may be captured by the
maxim “physician heal thyself!” In putting together KM solutions for clients, TCS has first
deployed the underlying methodologies, tools, technologies and programs internally. These
include a consistent and structured approach for driving the following deliverable capabilities:
• Unique maturity model for continuous assessment and improvement
• End-to-End solutions architecting and roll-out
• Industry Practice Support for domain solutions
• Dedicated Centers of Excellence – that address technologies such as Enterprise Content

Management (ECM) and Document Imaging and Archiving
• Partnerships with the leading product vendors such as IBM, EMC, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle,
Opentext and others
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Anand Rao envisions that the destination for KM is “a metrics driven delivery model
where the reuse of the work or project components is emphasized and also reviewed regularly.
Moreover, there are enterprise wide initiatives to collect, collate, tag and make available the
reusable components.”
This begged the question – does KM even matter? Is it enough of a key differentiator
when TCS’s competitors such as Infosys, Wipro, Accenture and IBM also possessed credible KM
platforms? Even if the above is true, will KM ever deliver “disruptive growth”? The current
thinking at TCS was to use KM to leverage existing resources (structural as well as human) with
appropriate tools and methods (please refer to Exhibit XI). A conventional industry analysis of
TCS’s KM strategy is articulated below to help the reader understand the climate in which TCS
operates.
Can KM build barriers to entry?
TCS has set up Global Network Delivery Centers in several hubs, each having a unique value
proposition for global and local businesses in order to serve specific business needs in a region.
An effective KM strategy would ordinarily support the notion of having such centers share
existing knowledge with delivery consultants at their regions and in creating new knowledge
capital for further re-use. Creating such synergies would serve as a barrier to potential entrants.
Can KM minimize the cost of exploration and attrition?
Aside from bringing new consultants up to speed with the exploitable knowledge base that resides
within TCS as well as its alliance partners, a KM platform also allows TCS to retain such
knowledge capital. For example, whenever a consultant leaves the organization, it is imperative
that TCS captures and retains considerable intellectual capital. As well, through several key
alliances with Technical, Industrial, Product and e-Business vendors across the world, TCS has
been able to meld extensive domain expertise, process methodologies, project management
capabilities, off-shoring capabilities, highly competitive and large resource pools for bids that
would not have otherwise been possible.
Can KM build in switching costs?
KM tools enable clients and other business partners to get calculable business benefits and pool
their knowledge resources. They help provide fast and cost effective methods of knowledge
exchange using templates, processes and even shared data. It doing so, TCS is able to integrate its
processes with its clients’ core business. Hence, KM can contribute to building switching costs
as they provide TCS with an unfair advantage over its competitors in the project bidding process.
Can KM deliver value in terms of exploiting knowledge assets?
KM tools such as MastercraftTM and AssentTM have allowed TCS to automate its software
development process and significantly bring down development costs by specifically re-suing and
building on design, code, components and solutions. TCS’s R&D investments have helped it to
enhance and differentiate the services and to strengthen its delivery capabilities. As the ground
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for advancement is present, the management of such knowledge base helps reduce cost and time.
Can KM generate higher margin products or services?
One of the major sources of TCS profit margins is its IT Strategy service line. TCS sells
outsourced software packages provided by suppliers with whom it has various partnership
alliances. TCS adds value by using a KM platform that supports such integration with its
partners’ offer and combining it with its own knowledge of the client and the existing solution
space. This integration is essential for TCS to be able to provide increasingly higher value
services to clients.
Taking KM to the Client
KM hence is forming a backbone of all business processes at TCS with the prime motive
of achieving the exploitation of assets in order to promote efficiency, value and quality. Sales,
which is an important primary process, uses a specific proprietary tool throughout the bid
management cycle. Delivery is another primary function that uses a comprehensive set of
applications to help TCS consultants access a reference area for details on past projects and
learning. Each competency or line of business manages its own specific knowledge base shared
across the organization, globally. Indeed, KM covers nearly every component of operation, from
Human Resources (recruitment, training) to Quality Assurance (delivery, innovation).
Much of the legacy knowledge repository resides on the corporate and branch Lotus
Domino servers connected through the 24*7, high-speed corporate intranet. A TCS consultant
can access the knowledge repository through a customized front-end browser or through the
Notes client. Via such an access, any consultant has at his or her fingertips access to TCS’s best
know-how and expertise to take to the client for any sales call or delivery function. With such a
focus on standardization and quality, TCS has achieved Software Engineering Institute’s
Capability Maturity Model (SEI CMM) Level 5 certification at many of its development and
delivery centers. This suggests a strict conformance to a process-driven culture within TCS.
In order to best provide a seamless "pipeline" for the flow of explicit as well as tacit
knowledge throughout the course of project delivery, TCS had developed an entire arsenal of KM
techniques, methodologies, tools, technologies and programs. A fuller account of the KM tools
and methods used within TCS has been given by Indu and Gupta (2006) and specific instances
described by internal use cases (cf. Mohanty and Chand 2005; Neemuchwala 2007; or
http://www.tata.com/tcs/articles/index.htm for the entire repository). The following table serves
the purpose of presenting an overview of currently used KM tools and techniques within TCS
managed by A Srinivasan, and programs managed by Dilip Mohapatra. Some of these solutions
are offered to clients by TCS’s KM practice led by Anand Rao.
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Methodologies
SIGMARG™: SIGMARG derives its name from Σ, the mathematical symbol for summation, and
describes the approach, methodology and a delivery model for successfully conceptualizing,
designing and executing a KM initiative for any client. It details the steps, critical success factors
and expected deliverables with measurable parameters, in steering the KM initiative. It also
covers all aspects of continuous improvement and is built on three basic building blocks -
planning, execution and monitoring. The three key modules of the SIGMARG methodology are:
strategy definition, implementation and governance.
5iKM3: The 5iKM3 Maturity Assessment model was first developed in-house by Mohanty and
Chand (2005) in order to:
• Assess and evaluate the state of acceptance and maturity of KM initiative
• Evaluate and benchmark current people maturity in participating in the KM initiative
• Measure the benefits of knowledge management initiatives
• Identify and define knowledge usage for business benefits
• Identify and define mid-course corrections in managing knowledge in the organization
The 5iKM3 approach is that knowledge maturity can be achieved by systematically addressing
the three pillars of KM: people, process and technology.
Tools and Technologies
ECM: TCS has collaborated with leading ECM vendors to provide a comprehensive solution
backed by strong domain knowledge. The ECM tool is applied pervasively in the sense that it
supports the creation, capture, organization, storage, search and transfer of (predominantly
explicit) knowledge. However, this has resulted in numerous knowledge islands with the
remaining challenging of integrating the search and retrieval functions.
eKMS: The objective of eKMS is based on the ground rule of knowledge creation and retention.
eKMS enforces some of the effective KM practices such as proposal tracking, client information
and document management. It also applies quality assurance and performance monitoring
features. Exploring possible means of sharing, creating and managing knowledge is the core
principle of eKMS.
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Ultimatix: This is a bigger platform (than the silos of ECM repositories) which attempted to
serve a larger functional audience – namely, pre-sales and sales activities. The Oracle based
Ultimatix provides cross-cultural capabilities by promoting the concept of working together
constantly, continuously and consistently. Ultimatix reduces technology spending and trims down
the layers of decision making within the organization. The TCS corporate intranet infrastructure
is used to build a multimedia repository for rich, explicit knowledge. Corporate knowledge is
captured by assigning various labels, categories, and indexes to each unit of knowledge (eg.
directories, templates, deliverables, marketing collaterals).
Document Management System: This consists of a repository of proposals, presentations and

white papers, developed internally for internal consumption, that may be used as marketing
collateral as well as training documents. TCS believes that it is the usage of such codified
knowledge and not the software platform, that makes all the difference.
Programs for the Learning Organization
TCS has a classification scheme, which is used to designate a certain level of expertise (and
hence billing rate). Currently they are identified and graded from E0 to E4 with E0 being the
entry-level grade. E3/E4 resources are technical experts or architects who are typically a
practice’s resources rotated on a regular basis from account to account and project-to-project.
They bring the expertise, experience and ability in kick starting the projects and designing
solutions. They are also involved in mentoring team members for effective project management.
They therefore represent the most profitable resource within TCS and the challenge is to train
and make available as many of them as possible. (Please refer to Exhibit VIII for an overview of
the learning and development programs at TCS).
CoP – Communities of Practice enable TCS and clients to exploit knowledge and expertise more
effectively by contextual mentoring and coaching. They are programs which enable guidance
and assistance to project or area-specific problems as and when they arise. Such online forums
are supplemented by conventional, face-to-face events such as Technical Architects Conferences
(TACTiCS) and Design Contests globally on an annual basis to reinforce these relationships. A
“Winners Conference” is regularly hosted to promote the sharing of best practices in the Project
Management space.
ILP - TCS’s Initial Learning Program (ILP) has been designed to provide a smooth transition
from the campus to the corporate environment. This program trains graduate engineers and
“science to software” trainees into E0-level IT consultants with an international mindset. The
participants are put through a rigorous 47-day program with a good mix of technical as well as
soft skills.
12
CLP: Continuous Learning Program is a demonstration of TCS’s commitment to its core value of
Learning and Sharing. The CLP programs are inevitably an outcome of business strategies,
project requirements, technology, business directions and individual aspirations, coupled with
technologies, domains, processes and soft skills. They are very thoughtfully put together by
champions within various practices and locations and cater to the requirements of the more
experienced E3/E4-level consultants within the organization.
LDP: TCS’s Leadership development program thrives to meet the ever-growing demand for
future leaders. TCS offers a basket of courses to cultivate leadership qualities and skills.
Consultants are carefully assessed for leadership potential and then put through rigorous
programs. TCS also encourages its personnel to attend various programs at premier Business
Schools across the globe. In both cases, the KM initiative is to ensure a match between
consultant abilities and a program’s potential for transformation.
Propel: As described by Commodore Mohapatra, “Propel as an ongoing movement

institutionalizes the culture of valuing consultants through mentoring that enables and enhances
individual performance and lead to empowered project teams.” In other words, it is a mentoring
arrangement that guides each and every consulting resource to perform at the highest value of
technical as well as soft skills.
FLI: TCS’s Foreign Languages Initiative enables consultants to communicate judiciously with
global clients. All TCS employees are encouraged to learn one or more foreign languages. This
initiative also helps non-English speaking consultants in the use of English effectively for
business communication. TCS strives to build an organizational culture that encompasses the
best of occupational and national cultures of all geographies it operates in. The new offering in
the space of Diversity Management and Cultural Sensitisation is focused on preparing
consultants to meet the challenges posed by globalization of business.
iQMS: TCS’s Integrated Quality Management System integrates process maturity, people
maturity and technology maturity through the practices and standards of various well-established
frameworks and models, including IEEE, ISO 9001:2000, CMMI, SW-CMM, P-CMM, BS 15000
and Six Sigma. iQMS also looks into competency building through Comprehensive Learning
Solutions and Delivery Mechanisms.
iCALMS: The Integrated Competency and Learning Management System (iCALMS) is equipped
with a host of competency definitions, role definitions, and online-classroom learning objects that
help consultants enhance their skills in a customized manner. Commodore Mohapatra
acknowledges that “Learning & Growth is a parameter in all Balanced Scorecards and
individual Goal Sheets and thus becomes a component of all performance evaluation and review
exercises.”
Apart from the above programs, TCS also encourages "workplace learning". Associates are
encouraged to learn while at work. To facilitate this, TCS has subscribed to a huge library of e-
Learning courses and online books. The classroom session and e-Learning materials complement
each other. E-learning will be incorporated into future versions of the knowmax platform.
13
Audits: Audit processes have always been followed rigorously at TCS. The audit process starts
with internal auditing followed by external auditing. An Internal Audit is typically done by an
IQA team, which is cross-functional in composition. TCS is an SEI CMM Level 5 company, which
is a testimony to its rigorous audit processes. The Business Excellence Model (TBEM) based
approach to Customer and Program management is used for external auditing.
From the above (albeit cursory) description, it is clear that a variety of methodologies,
technologies, and programs have thus been developed to support project management, project
execution, people development and performance measurement and these integrate processes
across groups, demography and cultural diversities. These (often developed and field tested by
TCS’s R&D wing) have been commercially exploited over the years. But the “proof of the
pudding is in the eating”. The question foremost on the minds of TCS executives is - will this
repertoire of methodologies, technologies and programs translate into continued “disruptive
growth”? As it stands, the above KM toolkit has been indispensible in supporting pre-sales,
proposal development, solutions delivery and project management activities in manners ranging
from the re-use of existing (certified) knowledge assets to receiving advice and guidance from
senior colleagues (cf. Neemuchwala 2007 for a more detailed account). In theory, knowmax was
supposed to evolve into the one-stop-shop for all of TCS’s KM needs.
Towards a One-Stop KM Platform
The result of this myriad of (particularly) tools was an unsatisfactory situation of their
ineffectual use. Both the delivery teams as well as the KM leadership within TCS acknowledged
this publicly. As a consequence of such deliberations, knowmax is a current corporate initiative
aimed at supporting know-how related issues by offering a one-stop platform for the information
needs of all TCS associates, this in essence, an amalgamation of past and future KM activities. It
is, in short, an attempt at integrating all KM efforts at TCS. Knowmax was architected as a
Share-Point based integrated KM platform aimed at leveraging existing tacit and explicit know-
how within the organization and to enhance customer value. It captures harvested knowledge
from various units such as Corporate, Practices, Delivery, Geographies, Sales / Pre-sales and is
accessible to all consultants with appropriate levels of security built in and includes assets from
explicit and tacit knowledge sources, structured and unstructured, internal and external, data and
information. The primary objective of knowmax is therefore to provide the appropriate
knowledge context to consultants so that they deliver high performance to clients by exploiting as
well as re-using TCS knowledge assets.
As the roll-out team headed by A. Srinivasan envisages: “Knowmax aims to be the one-
stop-shop that enables different units of TCS to effectively store, contribute, access knowledge
assets and collaborate through the portal for exploiting both explicit and tacit knowledge.”
However, it was also clear that due to the variance in the knowledge support required by the pre-
sales and delivery teams – which, by and large, were disjoint as well as independent – knowmax
was not going to be able to replace the “indispensable” Ultimatix whose taxonomy and indexing
was particularly suited for marketing activities.
14
The view on the ground was evident when interviewing several such project
teams in Singapore, India and the US, which determined that whereas the collection of
(pre-knowmax) KM platform was indeed adequate, consultants frequently lamented that
the social networks in a rapidly growing and globalizing firm was proving to be a
challenge.
The view prescribed by the designers of the knowmax solution was that delivery
consultants and other client facing personnel would, at the start of each business day, open up
their browsers on their workstations (or notebook computers) over a secure IP tunnel that linked
them to the TCS intranet and find themselves looking at the knowmax homepage shown in
Exhibit VII. Their, depending on their profile (competency, team and project affiliations) and
security access, they would be able to view a host of TCS resources – including deliverables,
financials, and workspaces (such as e-studios and wikis). All knowmas users (and particularly
the project consultants) would use knowmax as a portal to their e-mail, project scheduling,
calendaring, training and performance tracking needs.
The Talent Force for the Future
KM activities and initiatives in many large multinational organizations often come under
the CIO function and in several instances, a part of it is euphemistically known as KM
Programme Office. At TCS, the initiatives are currently decentralized to the extent that practice
leaders and consultants are individually responsible for developing competencies and careers. In
fewer cases, the responsibility for KM is located in existing departmental functions such as HR
(to manage learning, development and incentives) or IT (for content management and pervasive
computing). Major KM initiatives are championed by Commodore Mohapatra (fine-tuning the
learning organization), A. Srinivasan (providing a common KM platform for the practitioner),
and Anand Rao (responsible for delivering the success stories to clients). The end-result is a
broad base of support and contributions that takes KM forward within TCS.
So, amidst the festive occasions of Diwali and Eid, Anand Rao, A Srinivasan (vice
President for Corporate KM), and Commodore Mohapatra got together for some chai and chat in
the lush gateway campus of TCS in traffic laden Mumbai. They were in a pensive mood, despite
the carnival elsewhere. TCS was indeed at the cross roads – knowmax was up & ready, and was
launched with great fanfare on the first week of December 2006. However, its outcome remained
uncertain because they knew quite well that getting the technology right was only 20% of the
success of KM. The road ahead was uncertain, there was too much to lose in such a large-scale
rollout. Their “little fingers” were telling them that there was more to people and process factors
than they knew (please refer to Exhibit IX). Twenty questions were racing across their collective
minds – nearly six decades of experience among them.
STRATEGY
1. Can KM significantly support or sustain TCS’s high growth?
15
2. How can knowmax effectively leapfrog over the competition in terms of winning and
executing projects?
3. As TCS moves up the value chain in the types of projects that it bids for, is there a similar
evolution in KM deployment that moves from codification to personalization?
4. Can knowmax be used as a platform for innovation and business value for TCS clients?
5. Will KM and knowmax increase the Brand Equity (ie relational capital, and perhaps
profitability)?
TECHNOLOGY
6. Are knowmax and Ultimatix stable and scaleable platforms for global deployment? (Will
they even inter-work in the first place?)
7. Are knowmax and Ultimatix sufficiently open and robust that they can future-proof TCS’s
KM growth?
8. Is there a need for an SEI CMM assessment for the emerging KM platform as is now there
for other software development processes?
9. Is there a need to introduce a KM aspect of technology due diligence during M&As and JVs?
PROCESS
10. Are there intrinsic weaknesses in TCS’s KM processes?
11. Are TCS processes uniformly ready or consistent across geographies and practices in light of
M&A and rapid recruitment despite its CMM Level 5 certification?
12. What will be the extent of customization?
13. Are KM processes currently geared towards optimal development of competencies in

people?
14. Are current processes for protecting knowledge assets sufficient?
15. Are there knowledge synergies that are captured and exploited in the sales, delivery, practice
and support functions of TCS that are currently being overlooked?
PEOPLE
16. Given the high burn-out among consultants in TCS as well as the industry, how can
knowmax be rolled-out in order to garner efficiency gains while maintaining effectiveness
rather than becoming an overhead in itself?
17. Is there a KM initiative that will take into account the global diversity?
16
18. Are there sufficient people development and incentive schemes that will help make KM
successful?
19. Does the knowmax platform effectively support the convergence of human capital to
structural capital?
20. Will the challenges of international and inorganic growth stop TCS from being “ahead of the
curve” in its collaborative culture of knowledge creation, sharing and re-use?
EPILOGUE
Since TCS was too mature a knowledge enterprise for a run-of-the-mill KM Readiness
Assessment (cf. Foo et al., 2007 for an overview of the work of Duffy, Skryme and Holt), the
team of Messrs Mohapatra, Srinivasan and Rao instead considered a modified knowledge audit
which would comprise of structured interviews with key executives, a more extensive survey
across consultants, perhaps a project walkthrough to map the significant knowledge flows, and
finally a focus group session which would attempt to interpret some of the more subtle responses
(Please refer to Exhibits X and XI). Such a material knowledge audit (as opposed to an
exhaustive one), they figured, would be less disruptive to TCS’s operations and hence prove more
useful. They initially tasked the audit to an external team comprising overseas academic and
experienced MBA students. This way, they hoped to discern any disconnect between strategy and
implementation, and any disparities across the practice. In this way, they hoped to plug any gaps
between the “disruptive growth” strategy and leveraging KM.
An exhaustive knowledge audit (cf. Cheung et al. 2007; Liebowitz et al. 2002) generally
involves identifying what knowledge is needed, what knowledge already exists, where the gaps
lie, who needs the knowledge, and how it will be used. Hylton (2002) more formally prescribed
that the knowledge audit is an assessment of how the sum of explicit as well as tacit knowledge
within an organization is exploited throughout the knowledge-cycle and how the people and
business processes add to such knowledge. In particular: “The knowledge audit process involves
a thorough investigation, examination and analysis of the entire ‘life-cycle’ of corporate
knowledge: what knowledge exists and where it is, where and how it is being created and who
owns it. It measures and assesses the level of efficiency of knowledge flow. From knowledge
creation and capture, to storage and access, for use and dissemination, to knowledge sharing and
even knowledge disposal, when the organization is no longer in need of particular elements of
explicit or codified knowledge. With respect to people, the K-Audit measures “the efficiency of
transfer of tacit knowledge skills, when particular skills or expertise is no longer needed.” It is
hence the KM equivalent of the requirements determination phase undertaken during traditional
systems analysis and design. As is the case with financial or security audits, a major outcome is a
diagnostic assessment of what can be done better in order to fulfill a stated objective (usually a
business strategy).
17
It soon became apparent to all stakeholders that the material knowledge audit (of key
business processes such as sales, delivery and account management) that was envisioned would
be too superficial to provide specific and valid diagnostics as an outcome. A simple illustration
of this was in the design choice between codification and personalization. While it may be
intuitive to believe that as TCS moved towards higher value software development deals (with
their emphasis on innovation and tacit knowledge exchange), personalization tools (and
incentives) offer a greater leverage of knowledge than codification, it may be more a matter of
which stream contributes more significantly in terms of utility as well as volume. More
fundamentally, while it is often suggested that alignment to business strategy was a mandatory
aspect of KM (Zack 1999), there was no way of ascertaining if KM would contribute to Messrs
Ramadorai and Chandra’s ambitious growth targets until and unless the appropriate approach to a
knowledge audit was adopted.
In the business challenges of harmonizing both acquisitions as well as organic growth,

there were two major issues warranted closer examination than a cursory audit could provide
Knowledge Flows and Knowledge Sharing.
Further examination was needed to study the knowmax platform and its resulting
knowledge flows among the various project delivery teams. Gupta and Govinderajan (2000) have
reported interesting results in the realm of such knowledge flows within multinational
organizations. They arrived at models for knowledge flows which were functions of : the value
of the stock attributed by the source; motivation of the source to share; channels from source to
target; motivation of the target to receive; absorptive capacity of the target; and quality of
relations between source and target. There had to be a way in which to study knowledge flows
among project teams, which account for differences in the types of projects, cultural composition,
motivation and absorptive capacities. This may also unearth the selective effectiveness (and
limitations) of various KM methodologies, tools, and programs.
The issue of culture is emerging as a key challenge within TCS with its regal roots in
Indian history and economics. As TCS internationalized, A. Srinivasan concedes, “The Global
Network Delivery Model redefines the onsite or offshore model as a network delivery model
where one location (which need not be India) becomes the hub and all other locations as spokes.”
A current estimate is that there are over 1000 professionals in Brazil, Chile, UK and 500 in
Uruguay, Hungary and China in Global Delivery Network Model (Datta 2007). The challenge of
KM and management per se is therefore to keep such international project teams seamless in
thought and action. Auditing such cultural inconsistencies is tricky and perhaps beyond the
claims of KM strategy. Krishna et al. (2004) had addressed the complexities of such
international, inter-cultural communication and suggested that the use of “coordination and
control mechanisms” such as computer mediated communications, in order to be effective, must
be tempered by expert relationship management, training and staffing – an entire domain onto
itself. Harmonization for the purpose of project control was best achieved by using common
methodologies, processes and platforms. Concerns such as low trust levels due to cultural
differences, risks due to miscommunication when people involved are not able to communicate
face to face, frequently and casually across borders and time zones, lead to sub-optimal
knowledge processes of creation, transfer and re-use.
18
Is it therefore a leap of faith to believe that knowmax would be the solution that enables
TCS to leverage knowledge for growth? Proof of the pudding is indeed in the eating. Can KM
actually be leveraged to help TCS fulfill its much cherished vision of being in the Top Ten in the
first place given that its international competitors have already done so? Or do the challenges and
issues pertain more to organization culture and ask whether an Indian company can replicate its
success in unlikely destinations such as China, South America and Eastern Europe? If it is not
one already, how can TCS transform itself into a formidable learning organization that secures
sustainable competitive advantage? Finally, how can a knowledge audit be carried out that will
address any gap between a high growth strategy and leveraging knowledge to achieve this?
Acknowledgements
This case was written as a result of an almost two years engagement with TCS with the
special assistance of a group of extraordinary MBA students from the SP Jain Institute. The case
team is indebted to the senior management of TCS – notably Cmdr Dilip Mohapatra, Prof Mathai
Joseph and Messrs A. Srinivasan, Anand Rao and Biswajit Chatterjee – for their executive
support and resources that made this project a truly learning experience (hopefully for both
sides). Many thanks are also due to the KM Strategies class of 2007 – particularly Varun Jain,
Evelyn Ku, S. Kunjammai, Marina Cupif and Valérie Descas – for the painstaking critique and
analysis of a draft of this case and suggesting numerous options for the Research and Teaching
Notes. Finally, the lead author acknowledges the advice and guidance of Prof Shailendra Palvia
and two anonymous reviewers in making this a more readable article.
References
1. Birkinshaw, J. & Sheehan, T. (2000), “Managing the Knowledge Life Cycle”, MIT Sloan
Management Review, Fall, pp.75-83
2. C.F. Cheung, M.L. Li, W.Y. Shek, W.B. Lee and T.S. Tsang (2007). “A systematic approach for
knowledge auditing: a case study in transportation sector” Journal of Knowledge Management 11
(4) pp. 140- 158.
3. Chun-Wei Choo & Nick Brontis [eds], The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital and
Organizational Knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002.
4. Datta, N. (2007). “Gunning for Disruptive Growth”. Outlook Business 2 (4) pp. 56-62.
5. Davenport, T. and Prusak, L. (1998), Working Knowledge – how corporations manage what they
know, HBS Press, Boston.
6. Dossani, R. & Kenny, M. (2004), “Moving Tata Consultancy into the Global Top 10”, Journal of
Strategic Management Education 1 (2), JSME1-2CS2.
7. Gupta, A. K. & Govindarajan, V. (2000). Knowledge flows within multinational corporations.
Strategic Management Journal. 21, pp. 473-496.
8. Hansen M., Nohria N., & Tierney T. (1999). “What’s your strategy for managing knowledge”,
Harvard Business Review, March-April, pp. 106-116.
9. Hylton, A. (2002). Measuring & Assessing Knowledge-Value & the Pivotal Role of the
Knowledge Audit. Available at:
http://www.providersedge.com/docs/km_articles/Measuring_&_Assessing_K-
Value_&_Pivotal_Role_of_K-Audit.pdf accessed on 22-May-07.
10. Indu, P. & Gupta, V. (2006). Knowledge Management Initiatives at TCS, ICFAI Centre for
Management Research Case Study 906-004-1.
19
11. Krishna, S., Sahay, S. and Walsham, G. (2004). “Managing Cross-Cultural Issues in Global
Software Outsourcing”, Communications of the ACM 47 (4) pp. 62-66.
12. Liebowitz, J., Rubenstein-Montano, B., McCaw, D., Buchwalter, J., Browning, C., Newman, B.
(2000). The Knowledge Audit. Knowledge and Process Management, 7 (1), pp. 3-10.
13. Mohanty, S. and Chand, M. (2005). “5iKM3 Knowledge Management Maturity Model”. Tata
Consulting Services White Paper. Avaliable at :
http://www.tcs.com/NAndI/default1.aspx?Cat_Id=7&DocType=324&docid=419 accessed on 22-
May-07.
14. Neemuchwala, A. A. (2007). Evolving IT from “Running the Business” to “Changing the
Business”: Delivery Excellence in IT Software and Services; Tata Consulting Services White
Paper. Available at:
http://www.tcs.com/NAndI/default1.aspx?Cat_Id=102&DocType=324&docid=1545 accessed on
20-Oct-07.
15. Nonaka, I. & Takeuchi, H. (1995), The Knowledge Creating Company, Oxford University Press,
New York.
16. Schubert Foo, Ravi Sharma and Alton Chua (2007). Knowledge Management Tools and
Techniques, Prentice Hall, Singapore.
17. Senge, P.M. (1999), The fifth discipline: the art & practice of the learning organisation, Random
House, London.
18. Velloor, R. (2007). “India’s IT outsourcing sector still going strong”, The Straits Times, 3-Feb-
07, p 15.
19. Zack, M.H. (1999), “Developing a Knowledge Strategy”, California Management Review, 41 (3),
pp. 125-145.
Ravi S Sharma is Associate Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and
Information at the Nanyang Technological University. He was concurrently founding Director
(India Strategy) at NTU for a 2-year term. Ravi had spent the previous 10 years in industry as
Asean Communications Industry Principal at IBM Global Services and Director of the
Multimedia Competency Centre of Deutsche Telekom Asia. Ravi’s teaching, consulting and
research interests are in multimedia applications, services and strategies. His work has appeared
in leading journals, conferences, trade publications and the broadcast media. . He has also co-
authored a graduate level text on KM Tools and Techniques. He has been teaching IT and
management courses since 1985 (in Canada, Singapore, Dubai, Vietnam, Indonesia and India)
and enjoys this role as educator and mentor immensely. Ravi received his PhD in engineering
from the University of Waterloo and has been a Chartered Engineer (UK) and a Senior Member
of the IEEE. He also sits on the editorial or advisory boards of several professional and non-profit
organizations. He lives in Singapore with his family.
20
Exhibit-I: TCS Revenue Growth in Billions of US Dollars
21
Exhibit-II: TCS Business Philosophy
System integration expertise, network delivery

model & deep industry knowledge, e.g. with
Advanced Technologies: IBM, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, HP, Cognos, BEA..
Adobe… Alliances
Centers of
Service
Excellence Diversified; Entreprise sols,
Practices security, technology,
consulting, BPO, Assurance..
IEEE, ISO 9001:2000, CMMI,
Six Sigma Quality Standards
50 Delivery
Quality of Delivery Centers across
the world;
Framework Key Centers
highest level of
process
Business maturity
Top 20 – Good working

Assets
standards, Attracts
best talents
(Fast Growth of People
Capital) Sector
Industry
contributions,
People Practices
majorly by banking
financial services &
insurance, telecom,
manufacturing,…
Global Vision,
Global Presence (customer‐orientation) Network Mission &
e.g 169 officeis in 35 countries, 41 Delivery Values To be Global Top 10, by 2010 (in terms of
Delivery Centres in 11 countries
Model revenue), with learning & sharing as one
of its core values (growth of K‐capital)
22
Exhibit-III: Globalization of TCS
23
Exhibit-IV: Sector Contributions to Revenue
24
Exhibit-V: Growth of Human Knowledge Capital
TCS: One of the Largest Employers with 104,347 Employees
25
Exhibit-VI: Composition of Human Knowledge Capital
26
Exhibit-VII: TCS Enterprise Knowledge Portal
27
Exhibit-VIII: Organisation of Learning and Development Functions
28
Exhibit-IX: TCS Knowledge Strategy
29
Exhibit-X: Knowledge Audit of TCS CxOs
Survey of KM Practices at TCS
Template for Key TCS Executives
Name:
Designation:
No. of years with TCS:
1. What have been the top three strategic initiatives at TCS that promote creation,
sharing and re-use of its knowledge assets?
2. With the vision of joining the global top ten by 2010, what is the major strategic
initiative to go up the value chain in order to act as a barrier to entry for newer
competitors as well as a competitive advantage to retaining existing TCS customers?
3. How does TCS provide incentives for its consultants to share and re-use knowledge
such as coaching, mentoring and peer (or subject matter expert) review on
deliverables?
4. What are specific management strategies that encourage the re-use of explicit (e.g.
deliverables) as well as tacit (e.g. relationships, industry understanding) knowledge in
subsequent, similar projects? (In other words, what steps are taken to enhance the
structural capital of TCS as well as growing the human and social capital?)
5. How does the TCS leadership encourage contributions to knowledge repositories,

participation in communities of practices, peer review, coaching, mentoring, story-
telling as strategies to grow the TCS intellectual capital?
30
Exhibit-XI: Knowledge Audit of TCS IT Consultants
Survey of KM Practices at TCS
Template for Consultants
Please find below a set of questions about which we felt that your input would be
helpful in our study of understanding the work practices at TCS.
Also, please find a summary of the current practices at TCS, which we have been able
to collect. Kindly verify the same and give us feedback if there are any other
practices, which TCS is following.
We assure you that your responses will be kept anonymous. Should you require any
clarification, please feel free to contact us at rsharma@pmail.ntu.edu.sg or +65 6790
4414.
We take this opportunity to thank you for your co-operation.
Practice Profile (Please circle your selection)
Industry:
Telecom Banking Finance Insurance Manufacturing
Energy Retail Media Transportation Life Sciences
Competency:
ADM BPO Infrastructure Services Project Management
Test & Assurance BI/ERP Engineering Solutions
Geographic Region:
India Asia Pacific Europe North America
No. of years with TCS: < 5 5 – 10 > 10
Total number of years Experience: < 5 5 – 10 > 10
1. How are you encouraged by TCS processes to share and reuse project and
competency knowledge?
Î
31
2. Do you belong to a “Community of Practice” in which you can be mentored or

coached?
Î
3. Before, during or upon completion of a project, are there processes that extract
lessons learnt or best practices for sharing?
Î
4. How do you think you would be able to better share with your peers, the
project and industry knowledge you may have acquired during the course of
your work?
Î
5. Are you familiar with the TCS 5iKM3 framework? What is your self-
assessment of the various I-levels (Initial, Intent, Initiative, Intelligent and
Innovative) of your practice (i.e. Sector, Competency, Geographic region)?
You may qualify your response.
Î
6. Is there a concerted effort that improves consultants’ awareness of the TCS
knowledge map (i.e. what sources of knowledge there might be and where the
expertise resides)?
Î
7. Can you tersely describe a formal incentive program in TCS for creation,
sharing and reuse of knowledge assets?
Î
8. Are there any others that you know? Please provide 1-sentence descriptions.
Î
32
Please populate the matrix (first developed by GE in a different context) to

rate the various KM tools used. The X-axis represents the market usefulness
or value of a tool to TCS and the Y axis represents a tool’s functional
capability compared to other similar tools used in the industry.
Usefulness or Value of the Tool
High Med Low
High
Functional
Capability of
Tool Med
Low
33
RESEARCH NOTE
Leveraging Knowledge Management for Growth

“A case study of Tata Consultancy Services”
Ravi S Sharma
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Synopsis
This case is a typical story of how knowledge intensive firms operating in
competitive climates embrace a holistic strategy that promotes revenue growth, business
profitability, organizational learning, product / process innovation, and the retention of talent.
More specifically, it is about formulating an effective KM strategy in a scenario where legacy
systems, mergers and acquisitions, and a rapidly changing business environment are
formidable constraints. In this sense, the TCS case is hardly novel; however, what is indeed
unique is that a fairly new entrant with considerable financial clout and domestic brand equity
was able to enter a business and compete with the global top ten (the likes of IBM, EDS,
Accenture, HP, and Univac – some of its mentors early in the game) in the span of 20 years.
While by no means is this an exclusive KM success story, it nevertheless highlights what
several have been saying about the single-minded alignment of knowledge strategy to the
overall business vision and mission (cf. Zack 1999; Nonaka et al. 2000; Senge 1999). The
objective of writing up the case is two-fold: 1) it is hoped that KM researchers will find it
useful when exploring the issues confronting KM implementation, particularly the need for
further guidance in applying architectural frameworks, key performance measures and tools
for knowledge audits; 2) advanced students of KM who face a dearth of purpose-specific
cases on offer from HBS or ECCH have a context to apply the various strategic and technical
topics covered in class.
The case has not been written in chronological sequence nor in the order of priority.
Rather, the authors wished to express the complexities inherent in unearthing the strategic
imperatives, industry background, current practices, and management dilemmas by unraveling
these in an entwined rather than stand-alone manner. Hence, it is hoped that students and
researchers alike are exposed to the realities, trade-offs and sheer happenstance on the ground.
The narrative begins with the MAKE award, because wining it twice in a row convinced TCS
management that they were on to a good thing, silenced skeptics (insiders as well), and gave
market analysts some of the needed justification for the value of one of SENSEX’s bell-
weather stocks. It was indeed the beginning of the moment of truth for TCS insofar as it’s
cherished ambition to be in the top 10 by 2010 would materialize. One advantage of writing
about such a well-known and high profile subject is the abundant (and reputable) material
available on it (cf. http://www.tata.com/tcs/articles/index.htm) and while the exhibits
provide an authoritative profile of TCS’ business and people, readers are nonetheless
encouraged to research for additional information.
After a brief industry context, the case then talks about the well-known repertoire of
KM tools deployed by TCS globally (cf. Indu & Gupta, 2006). But these are neither unique
differentiators (the innovative criterion) nor competitive advantages (the efficiency criterion).
The competition has learnt well from Lou Gerstner’s transformation of IBM into an entity that
“exploits and develops knowledge” with a resulting innovative, learning and knowledge-
driven culture focused on sustainable competitive advantage (Drew 1999). Time an again, the
research on KM success stories reports that it is not the technology but the people who make
the difference (cf. Davenport and Prusak 1998; Collison and Parcell 2001), hence it was
34
necessary to painstakingly examine the “warm-ware” available to TCS. This included the
people being recruited, how they were trained and retained, and how their collective
knowledge was leveraged and re-used. A variation of a SWOT analysis was used to elucidate
the strategic context in which TCS operated. The authors deem an actual SWOT analysis to
be trivial for researchers (though a necessary exercise for students).
At about this time, TCS had announced to the authors (and undoubtedly their clients)
that it was going to roll-out a new global KM platform that would integrate with the legacy
systems, business processes and consultants’ learning and work styles. This struck the case
researchers as being a tall order but it highlighted the single-minded pursuit of its strategic
vision for growth and the seriousness with which KM was being deployed as a key enabler.
Although it came as a surprise that a high level KM Program Office was not formed within
the office of the Group CIO, it was apparent that this was so that it could be owned and driven
by the business units themselves with support from the IT, HR, R&D and other support
functions.
It was at this point that the authors detected a “moment of truth”. As described in the
case: Is it therefore a leap of faith to believe that knowmax would be the solution that enables
TCS to leverage knowledge for growth? Proof of the pudding is indeed in the eating. Can
KM actually be leveraged to help TCS fulfill its much cherished vision of being in the Top Ten
in the first place given that its international competitors have already done so? Or do the
challenges and issues pertain more to organisation culture and ask whether an Indian
company can replicate its success in unlikely destinations such as China, South America and
Eastern Europe? If it is not one already, how can TCS transform itself into a formidable
learning organisation that secures sustainable competitive advantage? Finally, how can a
knowledge audit be carried out that will address any gap between a high growth strategy and
leveraging knowledge to achieve this?
These are the tasks left to researchers and students using the case.
Research Framework for KM Strategy

From a research perspective, there are two fundamental issues that challenge TCS.
The first is in the construction of a framework that would help TCS map its knowledge eco-
system including strategy, process, people and technology. This is a task that is more
complex than it appears and whereas there are several such frameworks that have been
identified in the literature, there is a limitation in each in terms of suitability of use. For
example, Drew (1999) uses the so-called Boston Box covering the 4 quadrants of 1) knowing
what TCS knows 2) knowing what TCS does not know 3) not knowing what TCS knows and
4) not knowing what TCS does not know; in order to identify strategy and knowledge gaps.
But this pre-supposes that TCS will have a clear view of all knowledge assets (internal and
external, present and future). Zack(1999) classifies knowledge as core, advanced and
innovative that would allow TCS to benchmark itself against the competition, but this again is
a framework that is theoretically elegant but practically of little utility. Nonaka and his co-
workers, having spent years in the trenches, have formulated a more complex framework that
uses the SECI (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization) framework as
the means to capture knowledge capture and re-use. This is reproduced in the figure below:
35
Source: Nonaka et al 2000, p 23
While the framework adequately captures the realities of knowledge capture and re-
use (including the concept of shared spaces known as ba which aid in the knowledge cycle), it
is perhaps not feasible to expect students of KM to possess the skills and experience required
to spot such activities within the business context of TCS even if they were to witness them
first-hand rather than via a written case. Therefore the framework adapted from Choo and
Brontis (2000), shown below, seemed most appropriate.
Organizational Processes
Knowledge Creation Knowledge Transfer Knowledge (Re-)Use
ROLES ASSETS
Consultant Human
Knowledge Life-Cycle Capital
Project Team
Structural
Business Unit Capital
Organisation Relational
Capital
• Exploration • Codification • Exploitation

• Tacit Know-How • Replication • Mobilisation
• Culture • EKP Design • Best Practices
• Incentives • Expertise Locators • Valuation &
• Alliances Benchmarking
KM Strategy Parameters
In this framework, we consider the knowledge creation, transfer and re-use processes
within TCS and the agents who may participate in such processes (consultants, project teams,
business units or perhaps the entire organisation) in order to produce or exploit various
human, structural or relational knowledge assets. A host of parameters (ranging from
knowledge exploration to exploitation, codification, expertise location, EKP design to
mobilization and valuation) which capture the TCS knowledge strategy become apparent in
such an exercise. The authors recommend this framework as an aid in understanding and
36
articulating the TCS knowledge strategy. It is salient that the choice between codification and
personalization is in this case “a false dichotomy”.
Source: Adapted from Zack (1999)
A more useful framework for researchers is the question of where TCS positions
itself in the exploratory versus exploitative knowledge scales. This question re-visits the
learning paradox where an organization which is a leader may fail to further innovate. TCS –
as are most major Indian IT firms – is particularly sensitive to this as it does not want to
compete on price alone. Hence, a double-loop learning model which capitalizes on existing
knowledge in order to innovate may be necessary for TCS’s continued disruptive growth.
The second research issue involves the choice of a methodology for the purpose of a
knowledge audit. Despite the practice oriented work of Hylton (2002), Liebowitz et al.
(2002), KnowMap (cf. references for URL), and Skryme (www.skryme.com), there is an
absence of theoretically rigorous approaches for conducting a knowledge audit (as opposed to
an information audit). As Tiwana (2002) notes (cf. figure below), such an audit is, in essence,
an investigation of any gaps between business and knowledge strategies and must be
addressed going forward.
Source: Tiwana (2002)
The so-called knowledge need analysis suggested by Tiwana can help TCS develop
and then implement its knowledge strategy by first identifying gaps in the Knowledge-
Strategy Link by asking four fundamental questions to various stakeholders. The K-need
analysis should ideally also measure staff skills and competencies, opportunities for training
and development, corporate knowledge culture and practices such as knowledge sharing
37
attitudes, collaboration, team spirit, reward and recognition, relationship with co-workers. It
would be readily apparent to students that Exhibits IX and X, while satisfactory for an
overview of knowledge cycles, flows and gaps, are woefully inadequate for the purpose of
mapping a more complete picture of TCS’ current practices. The same would be true for a
host of KM Readiness Tools prescribed in the literature (eg Skryme) and TCS’ own 5iKM3
(Mohanty and Chand 2005) model that attests KM maturity. The issue is not one of judging
maturity but producing a knowledge map that spots gaps which are in turn best validated by
management and consultants via focus group and JAD discussions. This is a critical point
students must recognize right away and work towards appropriate methods of analysis.
Exemplars of these will be described next.
Take Away
In closing, it is hoped that this case has allowed students and researchers to develop
their thinking in some of the fundamental issues confronting knowledge strategies and the
difficulties in which such strategies are formulated. More specifically, the minimum learning
objectives should be:
1. The ability to articulate an understanding of TCS' “as is” and “to be” KM
strategies.
2. The development of a conceptual framework for conducting an exhaustive

knowledge audit including the identification of resources and time required to do
so.
3. Selection and justification of a usable method for the valuation of TCS'

knowledge assets so that services may be better priced and profitable lines of
business may be moved to higher marketing priorities. The valuation of
knowledge assets is also helpful during the due diligence phase of an M&A.
4. A thorough investigation into the current manner in which knowledge is created,

organised and re-used at TCS including addressing any seepages (“not knowing
what TCS knows”) and blind spots (“not knowing what TCS doesn’t know”) and
the policies for inculcating knowledge sharing as part of the organizational
culture (particularly given the rapid globalization of its workforce).
5. Proposing possible best practices for any strategic or knowledge gaps to be

addressed such as EKP enhancements, stemming knowledge attrition, the role of
CoPs in coaching and mentoring or continuous organisational innovation and
learning.
It becomes inherently clear that technologies which may be used in content
management, indexing and collaboration do not factor deeply into TCS’ issues and
challenges. The consideration of simplistic knowledge strategies in isolation – such as
codification vs. personalization or exploration vs. exploitation or internal/organic vs.
external/inorganic – becomes trivial. Hence it is recommended that researchers and students
alike apply a host of analytic tools and perspectives in order to develop an understanding of
KM strategies rather than seek an optimal solution for the knowledge audit and strategy
alignment. For example, the relationship between organizational culture and knowledge
sharing is in itself a major topic of discussion and debate. And this has been the objective of
writing such a case.
Acknowledgements
Once again, the first author is grateful to his accompanying co-authors for helping him
analyse and write the case and to the KM Strategies class of 2007 for the participation and valuable
feedback. Particularly Varun Jain, Evelyn Ku, S. Kunjammai, Marina Cupif and Valérie Descas for
their insightful contributions.
38
Additional References
1. Collison, C. and G. Parcell (2001) Learning to fly: Practical lessons from one of the world’s
leading knowledge companies, Oxford: Capstone.
2. Edvinsson, L. (2000). Some perspectives on intangibles and intellectual capital. Journal of

Intellectual Capital, 1(1), pp.12–16. A detailed description of Skandia’s Navigator is available
at: http://www.12manage.com/methods_skandianavigator.html
3. Know Map – the KM, Auditing and Mapping magazine, Toolkit: Auditing. Available at :
http://www.knowmap.com/current_contents/toolkit_auditing.html
4. Ikujiro Nonaka, Ryoko Toyama & Noboru Konno. (2000). “SECI, Ba and Leadership: a
Unifed Model of Dynamic Knowledge Creation” Long Range Planning 33 pp 5- 34.
5. David Skyrme Associates’ Know All Assessment Tool: http://www.skyrme.com/
6. Sveiby, K. E. (1997). The new organizational wealth: managing and measuring knowledge-
based assets. Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc: San Francisco.
7. Tiwana, A. (2002), The knowledge management toolkit: Orchestrating IT, Strategy and
Knowledge Platforms, NJ: Prentice Hall.
39
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Leveraging Knowledge Management for Growth: A Case Study of Tata

Article in Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research · October 2007

Ravi S. Sharma Sachin Kaushal

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Keywords – growth strategy, learning organization, knowledge management, knowledge

Industry Background and the Growth of TCS

Domestically, the Rajiv Gandhi government introduced a myriad of IT enabled services

Key Business Challenges

Knowledge Management (KM) refers to a range of practices and techniques used by

In the TCS context, KM offered systems, repositories, and corporate processes to

• Unique maturity model for continuous assessment and improvement

• End-to-End solutions architecting and roll-out

• Industry Practice Support for domain solutions

• Dedicated Centers of Excellence – that address technologies such as Enterprise Content

Can KM build barriers to entry?

Can KM minimize the cost of exploration and attrition?

Can KM build in switching costs?

Can KM deliver value in terms of exploiting knowledge assets?

Can KM generate higher margin products or services?

Taking KM to the Client

• Assess and evaluate the state of acceptance and maturity of KM initiative

• Evaluate and benchmark current people maturity in participating in the KM initiative

• Measure the benefits of knowledge management initiatives

• Identify and define knowledge usage for business benefits

• Identify and define mid-course corrections in managing knowledge in the organization

Tools and Technologies

Document Management System: This consists of a repository of proposals, presentations and

Programs for the Learning Organization

Propel: As described by Commodore Mohapatra, “Propel as an ongoing movement

Towards a One-Stop KM Platform

The Talent Force for the Future

1. Can KM significantly support or sustain TCS’s high growth?

10. Are there intrinsic weaknesses in TCS’s KM processes?

12. What will be the extent of customization?

13. Are KM processes currently geared towards optimal development of competencies in

14. Are current processes for protecting knowledge assets sufficient?

In the business challenges of harmonizing both acquisitions as well as organic growth,

Exhibit-I: TCS Revenue Growth in Billions of US Dollars

System integration expertise, network delivery

Top 20 – Good working

Exhibit-III: Globalization of TCS

Exhibit-V: Growth of Human Knowledge Capital

TCS: One of the Largest Employers with 104,347 Employees

Exhibit-VII: TCS Enterprise Knowledge Portal

Exhibit-VIII: Organisation of Learning and Development Functions

Exhibit-IX: TCS Knowledge Strategy

Exhibit-X: Knowledge Audit of TCS CxOs

Survey of KM Practices at TCS

Template for Key TCS Executives

No. of years with TCS:

5. How does the TCS leadership encourage contributions to knowledge repositories,

Exhibit-XI: Knowledge Audit of TCS IT Consultants

Survey of KM Practices at TCS

Template for Consultants

Practice Profile (Please circle your selection)

Telecom Banking Finance Insurance Manufacturing

Energy Retail Media Transportation Life Sciences

ADM BPO Infrastructure Services Project Management

Test & Assurance BI/ERP Engineering Solutions