Knowledge Management Titan Industries' Knowledge Management
Titan Industries' Best Practices in Knowledge Management
The ability of Titan Industries to attain best practices so rapidly in their Knowledge Management (KM) implementation illustrates how effective this strategic initiative can be in unifying business managers and Information Technology processors to a common objective. Global outsourcing leader Tata Information Systems is the subsidiary that owns Titan, so it is understandable how a very high priority was placed on KM planning, implementation and success. What makes the success of this KM initiative all the more remarkable was the scale it was attained on. Titan is operating with over 100+ departments, 1,550+ users and over 100 diverse and often desperate business processes to coordinate. This is a daunting project even by Tata Information Services standards.
Titan's Success with KM: An Analysis and Assessment
Titan was able to successfully integrate tacit and implicit knowedlge stored in both manual and automated systems and processes across their diverse organizational structure, while at the same time accomplishing an ambitious change management strategy. Like the scope of the departments and users in this KM implementation, the 600 stores located throughout India, each with varying objectives in the jewelry retailers' value chain including varying formats also exacerbated this effort. From large-format to multi-brand stores, Titan had to normalize the KM change management strategies while also creating a single system of record across the entire enterprise. The points of failure in many KM initiatives is in failing to create a unified system of record that often leads to multiple versions of truth throughout the enterprise. When there are no single systems of record throughout an enterprise, change management becomes nearly impossible because users don't trust the systems they are working on.
The culture of...
The culture of this specific Tata Information Systems subsidiary is heavily focused on precision engineering and the ability to respond very quickly to customer requirements and preferences; the company has earned a reputation of being exceptional; in this regard. With insight and leadership, Tata's senior management realizes this is because the company has made tacit and implicit knowledge available across all levels of the organization, transforming these aspects of their business into a competitive force more powerful than price competition (Goel, Rana, Rastogi, 2010). The agility the company has with being able to offer such a diverse series of merchandise items across a very eclectic nature of store locations, from small-format to relatively large for the Indian market, and is attributable to hwo fluidly knowledge permeates and moves through the organization. Tacit and implicit knowledge are the catalyst and fuel that are driving Titan to the success levels they are achieving today.
Titan has also chosen to sue their intensive levels of knowledge management to bring greater customer insight and intelligence into their decision-making processes as well. Through the use of forums and frameworks for capturing innovative ideas, the company has been able to make use of them given how well their processes are in place for managing tacit and implicit knowledge. Tata Information Services from a corporate standpoint is very focused on innovation and KM as strategic priorities, and has often hsoted events to foster and nurture this type of communication with employees, who often bring forward ideas from their customer base (Randeree, 2006).
One example of this type of event is the Innovation Bazaar. This event generated over 300 entries for the Innovedge program, which is used for seeking out new product and service ideas. There is a screening process Tata used before placing them…
