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KM tigers

ICICI Bank has grown six-fold since its KM strategy was established in 2000, making it the secondbiggest in India today. But that strategy has been robust enough to grow with it. Central to ICICIBanks success has been its flexible, innovativemethods, and a plethora of KM tools that werecannily marketed to staff from the very start.

By Deepa Prabhu

ICICI was founded in the mid-1950s at the behest of the World Bank, the Indian government andvarious captains of industry inIndia. Its purpose back then was to provide medium and long-termdevelopment finance for Indian business.

In the mid-1990s its business strategy shifted to take advantage of the opening up of the Indianeconomy. The idea? To create a diversified financial-services supplier offering a range of products,instead of concentrating purely on project finance. ICICI Bank was, therefore, established in 1994to provide retail banking facilities across India.

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

First steps

ICICI Banks knowledge management (KM) strategy wasestablished in 2000. Back then, thecompany was very much smaller than it is now just 1,200 staff compared to the 30,000that work for ICICI Bank today.

However, the programme was started at a time when the companys growth was starting to gointo overdrive. Initially, the organisation developed a broad technology-linked infrastructure,including a corporate intranet, ICICI Universe, intended to provide a platform where, for instance,employees could check the human resources (HR) system for vacation entitlements, book days offor view their personal pension details.

By putting these simple, but necessary activities on the intranet, it encouraged employees to getfamiliar with using web-based applications, to overcome any fear of technology as well as

providing them with a good reason for using the portal on a regular basis.

What began more as an idea and less as a project, was simply the belief that staff should have aspace on the intranet where they could participate in collaborative activities, such as contribute orfind documents, engage in discussions and post or answer queries. That idea, in essence, firstconverted the bank to KM.

Initially, the organisation was motivated to act due to the upheaval caused by the tail-end of thedot-com boom, which was depriving the bank of many good staff as they left in significantnumbers to join dot-com start-ups taking their knowledge and know-how with them. Wetherefore developedWiseGuy, ICICIsKM intranet portal easily accessible from the main staffportal to provide a way of capturing and disseminating the knowledge of departing staff.

To develop WiseGuy, a team was put together encompassing KM, HR, technology and researchwith a brief to just do it. Indeed they did and a beta version was ready withinjust three months.

Before the year was out, faced with the prospect of a reverse merger of ICICI Bank with its parentICICI, which went through in 2002, the KM team had to restructure to meet the needs of the newcorporate entity. Some issues articulated at the time included:

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

so on;4. How to overcome the problems caused by staff turnover;

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5. How to ensure that every person in the company is adequately equipped with the skills andtraining required for their jobs and for lifelong learning and development.

The deeper question was, quite simply, how do we create a hunger among staff to acquire andshare knowledge? That is to say, how do we create the culture? The aim was to ensure thatemployees stayed permanently aware of the external competitive challenges of the business, andto persuade them to remain constantly open to new thoughts, ideas and ways of working.

Satisfied users

In our view, employee satisfaction drives usage and we wanted to use this as the delivery vehicleto support three major information-handling behaviours: sharing, collaboration and self-help. Inessence, the workplace is no longer just a physical location. It has become a blend of physical andvirtual spaces in which work is undertaken.

The KM programme is now deeply embedded in the bank, but not as a result of any directive fromtop management. Employees work with the KMprogramme because they see its benefitsand realise the value it brings to them on a day-to-day basis. This is what makes it vibrant andengaging.

It is significant that a small project originally designed for about 1,200 employees in few locations

has been flexible and scalable enough to cater for more than 30,000 employees in more than 600locations, most of whom are customer-facing staff.

Everything they need should be at their fingertips, whether getting an answer to a problem,checking a policy or accessing standard templates and formats such as letters, agreements orguidelines.

The importance of scalability cannot be underestimated. In 2005, usage increased more than sixtimes compared to the year before and the portal marked a record one-million logins in November2004 after the site was redesigned. The number of staff using the KM portal doubled in the sameperiod.

On average today, about 6,000 users visit the site daily, of which 95 per cent come from ICICIBanks retail branches. And more than 40 business divisions actively participate in the KM effort tocontribute and publish content. Today, there are more than 14,000 individual items, about 1,000

daily searches for information and more than 16,000 interactive postings.

The WiseGuy KM portal also encompasses a variety of sections including: document management;news inside and outside the organisation; digital resources such as trade and news journals,research reports, maps, directories, currency and time calculators; information on the variousbusiness groups and group companies, complete employee information; and, interactive sectionssuch as discussion forums, query boards, book reviews, online quizzes, the rewards andrecognition scheme, and so on.

Wise Wednesdays

Early on, we realised that several senior people were reluctant to type and post submissions to theportal. So we invited them to share their tacit knowledge in an informal manner andthe WiseGuy Knowledge Leader Series (KLS) was born.

Guest speakers included experts on various topics, such as advanced finance, and internalbusiness heads who were delighted to be invited and were willing to give it a try. KLS evolved toinclude even chief the financial officers and CEOs of renowned companies in India, who havespoken on the topics of leadership and strategy.

Called Wise Wednesdays, we have conducted more than 60 KLS in various formats over a periodof three years from 2001 to 2004. It contributed immensely to our WiseGuy brand and reallyhelped to build the popularity of KM in ICICI Bank and, overall, gave our KM efforts huge visibility.

In another experiment, we set aside some time once a week for a knowledge caf in the canteenof our Mumbai headquarters. Similarly, we tried a variety of other formats, including informal

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brown bag concepts, in which staff would be invited to bring their lunch along to a presentationon a particular subject by a notable individual, to web conferences and live webcasts, so that anyuser in any location could participate. KLS encouraged face-to-face, live interaction and KM wastherefore not seen purely as a portal activity.

Not all of these were successful. For example, our knowledge cafes had to be abandoned becausethe noise in the canteen proved too distracting, while some of our speakers for the brown-bag

presentations felt offended that staff were tucking into their lunches while they were presentingabout weighty topics.

Corporate learning

The ability to learn across the group and from team mates is a very powerful tool. We aim to builda learning environment by encouraging collaboration and push mechanisms, including a webzine e-mail to every employee before 9.30am. The Daily Dose, as it is called, is a summary of what isnew in the outside world and on the portal. It features headlines, opinions, polls, happenings,customer appreciations, newsletters and other regular updates.

Again, one of the main benefits of the Daily Dose is the high profile it lends to our various KMinitiatives. When we polled staff, almost 97 per cent said that The Daily Dose represents animportant part of their working day. By delivering it direct to their mailbox, it helps the KM team tocapture the mind space of employees as soon as they sit down to work in the morning.

Other tools we use include Newsroom, a space on the intranet where daily news headlines arepublished. Here, staff can look up all the newsletters published by internal business groups, mediareleases, as well as tracking what our competitors are up to. Then there are K-mailers, which areshort, one-page reviews on any one of 33 topics in six categories; internal newsletters fromvarious domain specialists; online quizzes; word power articles or glossaries; training modules;and, a whole library of online research tools.

Query Board, a central, interactive frequently asked questions repository by and for staff, is wherethey can post any work-related queries, such as the number of cheques that can be deposited atany one time, customer credit questions, cheque returns and so on.

Indeed, anything work-related that demands authoritative responses from colleagues and in-houseexperts. It serves as the fastest and most reliable source for feedback on queries or doubts related

to workplace rules, policies and procedures, technical know-how and much more. Remarkably, theaverage response time to a query ranges from five to 15 minutes, but never more than one dayfrom the time the query was posted.

In addition to Query Board, we also offer a more general discussion forum on the intranet wherestaff can talk about finance, business and economy-related topics. Discussions on our forumrevolve around topics highly relevant to the work in the bank, such as the automatic cheque bookre-order system and solutions for detecting fake bank notes.

Managing documents on WiseGuy

The digital assets on WiseGuy represent a vital element of ourKMprogramme. WiseGuysdocument-management system offers a managed view into otherwiseoverwhelming enterprise content and provides users access to personalised content with team-specific interfaces to improve collaboration.

Centralised and distributed publishing capabilities mean that users are empowered and cancontribute their own documents, define them, schedule updates and so on. Furthermore, the portalmanager enables business groups to generate their own template-based, database-driven mini-websites using an extremely flexible front end, point-and-click tool.

The content is classified and organised by use of a simple tree view for easy navigation,supplemented by a search tool for easy retrieval. Information can be located within two or threeclicks, or less than a minute of searching. Other key features include easy identification ofdocuments by author, date, posted comments and even queries.

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The system helps to preserve the organisationsintellectual capital, as it is able to captureinformation so that it is not lost even when a person leaves the organisation. To encourageparticipation, sticky features on the portal include opinion polls, cartoons, tips, word of the dayand tools available to business teams to conduct surveys and online quizzes.

Technology platforms

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

Implementation was eased by the fact that it was not one single mega project, but a combinationof many experiments and modular launches. This means that we nurtured what worked anddiscarded along the way any elements that plainly did not work.

One early project was a Yellow Pages-style directory for the entire corporate group. These, ofcourse, are quite common KM tools, helping put staff in direct contact with one another. Theresult, Peoplefinder, is the experts directory that employees use to locateothers and update theirown profile with interests, areas of expertise where they can help colleagues and other relevantinformation. Creating it was like opening the doors and windows in a dusty house shut for manymonths as people who did not even know who was sitting on the same floor as them suddenly gotconnected and it continues to be one of the most-used sections.

Many implementations began as line-of-business pilots. At your Service is one such example inwhich employees who are also customers of the bank can talk directly with the product andprocess teams for personal banking issues. With a back-end plug-in to the call centre it serves thedual purpose of learning while solving problems. It was so effective that it was replicated for otherteams too.

Compliance, quality and customer service

In 2002, the bank launched its quality programme to achieve the relevant certification levelsthroughout the organisation. Naturally, KMsrole was to support the quality team and we did thisby building a KM mini-portal on quality. This quality portlet maintains the background material,documents on Six Sigma methodology, international quality standards, certifications and

everything else that relates to the organisationsendeavours in maintaining quality levels. Staffcan also post and respond to queries and interact with the quality experts.

KM tools and techniques are also deployed so that customer-service teams and those staff whodeal directly with the public can share almost everything related to customer complaints andservice quality issues, from branch and customer satisfaction with cash machines, to standardtemplates, letters, tools, to recognising and celebrating customer satisfaction benchmarks andpeople who have achieved it. The various activities, contributions and postings help spread thegood practices throughout the bank.

Of course, banks today have to deal with growing regulatory demands, including circulars andnotices from the regulatory authorities that must be followed to the letter. We therefore created E-Circulars to inform and educate staff on regulatory and compliance matters. It is used bydesignated senior managers who have a duty to inform employees on guidelines issued by variousregulatory authorities as they affect the bankspolicies, products and processes. It is not all one-

way. Recipients can also be tested with four or five key questions to ensure that they broadlyunderstand the content.

Beyond the surface to the soul

This is a phrase from a very useful book on the topic. It states that KM is not just a set oftechniques or practices. If that were so, it would not have been difficult for other manufacturers tocopy the Toyota Production System, for example, even though the details have been relayed inbooks and Toyotaeven gives tours of its manufacturing facilities it is no secret. The difference isin its philosophy and perspective about such things as people, processes, quality, continuous

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improvement and other factors that represents not just the surface what you can see but theinner soul.

This has become increasingly relevant with the realisation that few jobs are well structured or welldefined. Instead, knowledge work is defined at the point of need by the issues, problems oropportunities that arise. Researchers and authors Pfeffer and Sutton asked why it was that with somuch education and research, management consulting, books and articles, that the little change

that does occur often happens with such great difficulty. They concluded it was because knowledgeof what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behaviour consistent with thatknowledge.

This is what they called the knowing-doing gap. Their studyanalysed how some organisations areconsistently able to turn knowledge into action while others fail. Their findings suggest that it ismanagement practices that either create or reduce the knowing-doing gap. In our work, the KMteam used their insights as a guiding philosophy.

Rather than waiting for culture to change, we banked on change impacting the culture. We tried tomake it fun and prestigious and persuaded leaders to champion our KM efforts. In experimentingwith so many new things and new ways of doing old things, risk taking was encouraged andmistakes were not considered fatal.

Marketing, it is frequently said, is absolutely key to encouraging the use of KM systems. At ICICI

Bank, employees are encouraged to participate and contribute by way of rewards and recognition.First, the very fact that contributions are published on the portal along with ownership detailsgives employees a sense of recognition for everything they do.

Every contributor earns K-Points for contributing anything from an article to documents, queries,responses to queries, initiating a discussion and even just rating discussions. A separate section onthe intranet is dedicated to the knowledge champions, displaying the top contributors based ontheir knowledge quotient. This KQ is also prominently displayed on their home page next toa personalised welcome message. K-Cash, an earlier version of the rewards scheme, enabledemployees to redeem gift vouchers online for the points they earned. And knowledge leaders whospoke in the Knowledge Leader Series, as well as knowledge champions, were given certificatessigned by the managing director and CEO of the bank.

Marketing KM, we found, is all about making connections, so we didnt hold back. Early on, we

moved to win over senior management to help usevangelise our work. Then there were mailers,posters, group presentations, off-site meetings, open house sessions on KM, regular publishing onthe portal, surveys, a KM newsletter, even bare-faced gimmicks. When, forinstance, WiseGuy completed its first year, employees who logged on to their machines in themorning were surprised by a short 40-second video embedded in an e-mail with bankdirector Chanda Kochar delivering

a message on the value of KM, congratulating them and urging them to use it more. It had thewhole company talking about it for days and successfully generated further interest in KM at ICICIBank. However, user tools were kept relatively free of catchy, gimmicky names in favour of simple,explanatory terms that explained their purpose. For instance, we eschewed names like Guru,Oracle, Solomon, Answer Point and any number of catchy acronyms in favour of the simpler QueryBoard, Discussion Forum and E-Circulars.

This helped us to stand out from the crowd. Users, we feel, appreciated having something plainvanilla whose purpose they could understand and relate to. The care we took in marketing wasreflected in other ways. For instance, early on the KM team would use internal marketingcampaigns inspired by topical themes, but this was stopped when we realised that it would not berelevant to everyone throughout India let alone in London,Moscow and Toronto.

Challenges

The short history of KM in ICICI Bank has not been plain sailing. Having a director throw hisweight behind the project certainly provided an initial thrust. It sent a positive signal across

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the organisation that the top brass were serious about KM, but it also ran the risk of beingperceived as a pet project or flavour of the month.

While many employees actively use the portal, there are gaps in pockets among mid-levelmanagers. I knowbest and not invented here attitudes remain a barrier. Knowledge sharing isnot tightly linked to staff appraisal and neither are knowledge management activities mentioned inICICI Banks balanced score card index if it were, it may be a different matter.

Certain measures can be a double-edged sword. For instance, one team started an internalinitiative in which they asked team members to submit suggestions, linking their participation toperformance indicators and making it a part of an employees mandatory goals. However, it wassoon observed and reported that some staff were taking ideas from WiseGuy and submitting themto their group system. Such instances undermine or detract from the overall process and can stokeinternal conflict.

From a technical perspective, the KM initiatives have done a better job of capturing internal andexternal unstructured information, such as documents and ideas and in harnessing externalstructured data such as content and databases versus internal structured data, such as datawarehouses, enterprise resource-planning applications and databases. Disparate systems cancreate fatigue and/or confusion among users about which one to use.

First-generation KM revolved around creating processes to capture, codify and organise knowledge

for retrieval. In second-generation KM, knowledge flows becomes more important than theknowledge itself. The third generation of KM involves easing the creation of new knowledge,innovation and improving organisational performance. Maturity levels vary according to theapplications within each teams.

At ICICI Bank, the business leadership team, by sponsorship and example, has outlined principlesof action that stipulate that employees must actively share knowledge and seek out colleaguesexpertise to solve problems and/or improve processes. KM at ICICI Bank was started in a non-dictatorial manner and its use is voluntary, but a programme of this nature cannot be expected tocontinue on momentum. But to the average employee in the bank, KM now is no longer strange ora novelty, but has become the way we work.

So while we build for scale, we design for the soul. The KM team is encouraged to be open-minded, to bring in outside resources and to avoid being ego-driven to find solutions within only.

When this is done, it is a value arbitrage and a not cost arbitrage.

On many occasions it is not about KM strategy, but survival strategy. Simply ensuring that theproposals and projects see the light of the day, ensuring they are nurtured and survive initialskepticism and hiccups.

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

Deepa Prabhu is the head of knowledge management at ICICI Bank. She can be contactedatdeepa.prabhu@icicibank.com

WiseGuy contributions

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

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

mailto:deepa.prabhu@icicibank.commailto:deepa.prabhu@icicibank.commailto:deepa.prabhu@icicibank.com

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What works

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

Listen, listen, listen. Then listen some more; Speed is of the essence lead, dont follow; Maintain the intrinsic organic nature and growth versus design and diktat; Dont kill any idea however small; Tap the collective energy; Compassion and caring most employees are struggling with personal issues of work-life

balance and stress. If KM helps decrease this, you have a convert; Sensing underlying concerns; Team work, every time.