Knowledge Management Titan Industries\' Knowledge Management Titan

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 Titan actually helped them to streamline this implementation effort however. 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 into the product development pipeline, yet this approach to development has been exceptionally effective. Titan shows by doing this how best to make tacit and implicit knowledge, formed into a system of record, into a highly effective catalyst of innovation. Titan also was able to rely on the implementation and system integration expertise of their parent organization with the SAP implementation of their knowledge management system. As Tata Information Systems is one of the global leaders in SAP consulting and system integration, this strategy of having Tata's system consultants provide their experience proved to be invaluable. While Tata's assistance helped to overcome many of the complexities of implementing the enterprise software, the decisions that Titan made in terms of change management were even more important to their success (Randeree, 2006). It is unusual to see a KM implementation take four years to implement, yet Titan was able to accomplish this by first focusing on change management and second, on the technologies involved.

KM Best Practices at Titan KM: Lessons Learned

The most significant best practice that Titan has been able to attain within their organization is more driven by their patience and less by their use of technology. The gradual introduction of the change management strategies within the company and the ability to create a sustained, highly focused strategy on integrating tacit and implicit knowledge required a long-term focus coup[led with short-term results. This ability to take a very long-term focus to complex KM project implies transformational leadership on the part of the Titan management team. The first and most significant best practice is change management.

Second, Titan was able to sequence all KM systems and technologies to strengthen, not detract, from trust in the many changes necessary to make the system implement a success. This took a more disciplined approach to development than many other technology-based companies are capable of as it focused on the human factors, not the software or systems-based ones first (Randeree, 2006).