ICICI Bank Essay Sample

ICICI Bank has grown sextuple since its KM scheme was established in 2000. doing it the 2nd biggest in India today. But that scheme has been robust plenty to turn with it. Central to ICICI Bank’s success has been its flexible. advanced methods. and a overplus of KM tools that were presciently marketed to staff from the really start.

By Deepa Prabhu

ICICI was founded in the mid-1950s at the behest of the World Bank. the Indian authorities and assorted ‘captains of industry’ in India. Its intent back so was to supply medium and long-run development finance for Indian concern.

In the mid-1990s its concern scheme shifted to take advantage of the opening up of the Indian economic system. The thought? To make a diversified financial-services provider offering a scope of merchandises. alternatively of concentrating strictly on undertaking finance. ICICI Bank was. hence. established in 1994 to supply retail banking installations across India.

The thought was good timed and proved wildly successful. Today. it is the 2nd largest bank in India with assets of about $ 40bn and can tout a web of more than 570 subdivisions and a steadily turning international concern. with subdivisions in the UK. Russia and Canada.

First stairss

ICICI Bank’s cognition direction ( KM ) scheme was established in 2000. Back so. the company was really much smaller than it is now – merely 1. 200 staff compared to the 30. 000 that work for ICICI Bank today.

However. the programme was started at a clip when the company’s growing was get downing to travel into overdrive. Initially. the administration developed a wide technology-linked substructure. including a corporate intranet. ICICI Universe. intended to supply a platform where. for case. employees could look into the human resources ( HR ) system for holiday entitlements. book yearss off or see their personal pension inside informations.

By seting these simple. but necessary activities on the intranet. it encouraged employees to acquire familiar with utilizing web-based applications. to get the better of any fright of engineering every bit good as supplying them with a good ground for utilizing the portal on a regular footing.

What began more as an thought and less as a undertaking. was merely the belief that staff should hold a infinite on the intranet where they could take part in collaborative activities. such as contribute or happen paperss. engage in treatments and station or reply questions. That thought. in kernel. foremost converted the bank to KM.

Initially. the administration was motivated to move due to the turbulence caused by the tail-end of the dot com roar. which was striping the bank of many good staff as they left in important Numberss to fall in dot-com start-ups – taking their cognition and know-how with them. We therefore developed WiseGuy. ICICI’s KM intranet portal – easy accessible from the chief staff portal – to supply a manner of capturing and circulating the cognition of going staff.

To develop WiseGuy. a squad was put together embracing KM. HR. engineering and research with a brief to ‘just make it’ . Indeed they did and a beta version was ready within merely three months.

Before the twelvemonth was out. faced with the chance of a rearward amalgamation of ICICI Bank with its parent ICICI. which went through in 2002. the KM squad had to reconstitute to run into the demands of the new corporate entity. Some issues articulated at the clip included:

How to link this huge new pool of employees with each other ; How to portion business-related information about clients. trades and thoughts ; How to pull off staff through the alteration procedure via communicating. messages. channels and so on ; How to get the better of the jobs caused by staff turnover ;

How to guarantee that every individual in the company is adequately equipped with the accomplishments and preparation required for their occupations and for womb-to-tomb acquisition and development.

The deeper inquiry was. rather merely. how do we make a hungriness among staff to get and portion cognition? That is to state. how do we make the civilization? The purpose was to guarantee that employees stayed for good cognizant of the external competitory challenges of the concern. and to carry them to stay invariably unfastened to new ideas. thoughts and ways of working.

Satisfied users

In our position. employee satisfaction drives usage and we wanted to utilize this as the bringing vehicle to back up three major information-handling behaviors: sharing. coaction and self-help. In kernel. the workplace is no longer merely a physical location. It has become a blend of physical and practical infinites in which work is undertaken.

The KM programme is now profoundly embedded in the bank. but non as a consequence of any directing from top direction. Employees work with the KM programme because they see its benefits and gain the value it brings to them on a daily footing. This is what makes it vivacious and prosecuting.

It is important that a little undertaking originally designed for approximately 1. 200 employees in few locations has been flexible and scalable plenty to provide for more than 30. 000 employees in more than 600 locations. most of whom are customer-facing staff.

Everything they need should be at their fingertips. whether acquiring an reply to a job. look intoing a policy or accessing standard templets and formats such as letters. understandings or guidelines.

The importance of scalability can non be underestimated. In 2005. use increased more than six times compared to the twelvemonth before and the portal marked a record one-million logins in November 2004 after the site was redesigned. The figure of staff utilizing the KM portal doubled in the same period.

On mean today. about 6. 000 users visit the site day-to-day. of which 95 per cent semen from ICICI Bank’s retail subdivisions. And more than 40 concern divisions actively take part in the KM attempt to lend and print content. Today. there are more than 14. 000 single points. about 1. 000 day-to-day hunts for information and more than 16. 000 synergistic posters.

The WiseGuy KM portal besides encompasses a assortment of subdivisions including: papers direction ; intelligence inside and outside the administration ; digital resources such as trade and intelligence diaries. research studies. maps. directories. currency and clip reckoners ; information on the assorted concern groups and group companies. complete employee information ; and. synergistic subdivisions such as treatment forums. question boards. book reappraisals. online quizzes. the wagess and acknowledgment strategy. and so on.

Wise Wednesdays

Early on on. we realised that several senior people were loath to type and post entries to the portal. So we invited them to portion their tacit cognition in an informal mode and the WiseGuy Knowledge Leader Series ( KLS ) was born.

Guest talkers included experts on assorted subjects. such as advanced finance. and internal concern caputs who were delighted to be invited and were willing to give it a attempt. KLS evolved to include even main the fiscal officers and CEOs of celebrated companies in India. who have spoken on the subjects of leading and scheme.

Called ‘Wise Wednesdays’ . we have conducted more than 60 KLS in assorted formats over a period of three old ages from 2001 to 2004. It contributed vastly to our WiseGuy trade name and truly helped to construct the popularity of KM in ICICI Bank and. overall. gave our KM attempts immense visibleness.

In another experiment. we set aside some clip one time a hebdomad for a cognition cafe in the canteen of our Mumbai central office. Similarly. we tried a assortment of other formats. including informal ‘brown bag’ constructs. in which staff would be invited to convey their tiffin along to a presentation on a peculiar topic by a noteworthy person. to net conferences and unrecorded webcasts. so that any user in any location could take part. KLS encouraged face-to-face. unrecorded interaction and KM was hence non seen strictly as a portal activity.

Not all of these were successful. For illustration. our cognition coffeehouse had to be abandoned because the noise in the canteen proved excessively deflecting. while some of our talkers for the brown-bag presentations felt offended that staff were inserting into their tiffins while they were showing about weighty subjects.

Corporate acquisition

The ability to larn across the group and from squad couples is a really powerful tool. We aim to construct a acquisition environment by promoting coaction and push mechanisms. including a webzine electronic mail to every employee before 9. 30am. The Daily Dose. as it is called. is a sum-up of what is new in the outside universe and on the portal. It features headlines. sentiments. polls. occurrences. client grasps. newssheets and other regular updates.

Again. one of the chief benefits of the Daily Dose is the high profile it lends to our assorted KM enterprises. When we polled staff. about 97 per cent said that The Daily Dose represents an of import portion of their on the job twenty-four hours. By presenting it direct to their letter box. it helps the KM squad to capture the ‘mind space’ of employees every bit shortly as they sit down to work in the forenoon.

Other tools we use include Newsroom. a infinite on the intranet where day-to-day intelligence headlines are published. Here. staff can look up all the newssheets published by internal concern groups. media releases. every bit good as tracking what our rivals are up to. Then there are ‘K-mailers’ . which are short. one-page reappraisals on any one of 33 subjects in six classs ; internal newssheets from assorted sphere specializers ; on-line quizzes ; ‘word power’ articles or glossaries ; developing faculties ; and. a whole library of on-line research tools.

Query Board. a cardinal. synergistic often asked inquiries depository by and for staff. is where they can post any work-related questions. such as the figure of checks that can be deposited at any one clip. client recognition inquiries. check returns and so on.

Indeed. anything work-related that demands important responses from co-workers and in-house experts. It serves as the fastest and most dependable beginning for feedback on questions or uncertainties related to workplace regulations. policies and processs. proficient know-how and much more. Unusually. the mean response clip to a question ranges from five to 15 proceedingss. but ne’er more than one twenty-four hours from the clip the question was posted.

In add-on to Query Board. we besides offer a more general treatment forum on the intranet where staff can speak about finance. concern and economy-related subjects. Discussions on our forum revolve around subjects extremely relevant to the work in the bank. such as the automatic check book re-order system and solutions for observing bogus bank notes.

Pull offing paperss on WiseGuy

The digital assets on WiseGuy represent a critical component of our KM programme. WiseGuy’s document-management system offers a managed position into otherwise overpowering endeavor content and provides users entree to personalised content with team-specific interfaces to better coaction.

Centralised and distributed publication capablenesss mean that users are empowered and can lend their ain paperss. specify them. agenda updates and so on. Furthermore. the portal director enables concern groups to bring forth their ain template-based. database-driven mini-websites utilizing an highly flexible front terminal. point-and-click tool.

The content is classified and organised by usage of a simple tree position for easy pilotage. supplemented by a hunt tool for easy retrieval. Information can be located within two or three chinks. or less than a minute of seeking. Other cardinal characteristics include easy designation of paperss by writer. day of the month. posted remarks and even questions.

The system helps to continue the organisation’s rational capital. as it is able to capture information so that it is non lost even when a individual leaves the administration. To promote engagement. ‘sticky’ characteristics on the portal include sentiment polls. sketchs. tips. word of the twenty-four hours and tools available to concern squads to carry on studies and on-line quizzes.

Technology platforms

Much of what is deployed to back up our assorted KM enterprises is custom-developed. but the tools are supported on a assortment of standard hardware and package platforms. peculiarly Microsoft Windows. Linux. Microsoft Office. OpenOffice ( the open-source option to Microsoft Office ) . and a host of other off-the-rack and custom applications.

Execution was eased by the fact that it was non one individual mega undertaking. but a combination of many experiments and modular launches. This means that we nurtured what worked and discarded along the manner any elements that obviously did non work.

One early undertaking was a ‘Yellow Pages’-style directory for the full corporate group. These. of class. are quite common KM tools. assisting put staff in direct contact with one another. The consequence. Peoplefinder. is the experts’ directory that employees use to turn up others and update their ain profile with involvements. countries of expertness where they can assist co-workers and other relevant information. Making it was like opening the doors and Windowss in a dust-covered house shut for many months as people who did non even cognize who was sitting on the same floor as them all of a sudden got ‘connected’ and it continues to be one of the most-used subdivisions.

Many executions began as line-of-business pilots. ‘At your Service’ is one such illustration in which employees who are besides clients of the bank can speak straight with the merchandise and procedure squads for personal banking issues. With a back-end circuit board to the call centre it serves the double intent of larning while work outing jobs. It was so effectual that it was replicated for other squads excessively.

Conformity. quality and client service

In 2002. the bank launched its quality programme to accomplish the relevant enfranchisement degrees throughout the administration. Naturally. KM’s function was to back up the quality squad and we did this by constructing a KM mini-portal on quality. This quality ‘portlet’ maintains the background stuff. paperss on Six Sigma methodological analysis. international quality criterions. enfranchisements and everything else that relates to the organisation’s endeavours in keeping quality degrees. Staff can besides post and react to questions and interact with the quality experts.

KM tools and techniques are besides deployed so that customer-service squads and those staff who deal straight with the populace can portion about everything related to client ailments and service quality issues. from subdivision and client satisfaction with hard currency machines. to standard templets. letters. tools. to recognizing and observing client satisfaction benchmarks and people who have achieved it. The assorted activities. parts and posters help distribute the good patterns throughout the bank.

Of class. Bankss today have to cover with turning regulative demands. including handbills and notices from the regulative governments that must be followed to the missive. We hence created E-Circulars to inform and educate staff on regulative and conformity affairs. It is used by designated senior directors who have a responsibility to inform employees on guidelines issued by assorted regulative governments as they affect the bank’s policies. merchandises and procedures. It is non all one-way. Recipients can besides be tested with four or five cardinal inquiries to guarantee that they loosely understand the content.

Beyond the surface to the psyche

This is a phrase from a really utile book on the subject. It states that KM is non merely a set of techniques or patterns. If that were so. it would non hold been hard for other makers to copy the Toyota Production System. for illustration. even though the inside informations have been relayed in books and Toyota even gives Tourss of its fabrication installations – it is no secret. The difference is in its doctrine and position about such things as people. procedures. quality. uninterrupted betterment and other factors that represents non merely the surface – what you can see – but the interior psyche.

This has become progressively relevant with the realization that few occupations are good structured or good defined. Alternatively. cognition work is defined at the point of demand by the issues. jobs or chances that arise. Research workers and writers Pfeffer and Sutton asked why it was that with so much instruction and research. direction consulting. books and articles. that the small alteration that does happen frequently happens with such great trouble. They concluded it was because cognition of what needs to be done often fails to ensue in action or behaviour consistent with that cognition.

This is what they called the ‘knowing-doing gap’ . Their survey analysed how some administrations are systematically able to turn cognition into action while others fail. Their findings suggest that it is direction patterns that either create or cut down the knowing-doing spread. In our work. the KM squad used their penetrations as a guiding doctrine.

Rather than waiting for civilization to alter. we banked on alteration impacting the civilization. We tried to do it fun and esteemed and persuaded leaders to defend our KM attempts. In experimenting with so many new things and new ways of making old things. hazard pickings was encouraged and errors were non considered fatal.

Selling. it is often said. is perfectly cardinal to promoting the usage of KM systems. At ICICI Bank. employees are encouraged to take part and lend by manner of wagess and acknowledgment. First. the really fact that parts are published on the portal along with ownership inside informations gives employees a sense of acknowledgment for everything they do.

Every subscriber earns ‘K-Points’ for lending anything from an article to paperss. questions. responses to questions. originating a treatment and even merely evaluation treatments. A separate subdivision on the intranet is dedicated to the ‘knowledge champions’ . exposing the top subscribers based on their ‘knowledge quotient’ . This KQ is besides conspicuously displayed on their place page following to a personalised welcome message. ‘K-Cash’ . an earlier version of the wagess strategy. enabled employees to deliver gift verifiers online for the points they earned. And cognition leaders who spoke in the Knowledge Leader Series. every bit good as cognition title-holders. were given certifications signed by the pull offing manager and CEO of the bank.

Marketing KM. we found. is all about doing connexions. so we didn’t keep back. Early on. we moved to win over senior direction to assist us evangelize our work. Then there were Mailers. postings. group presentations. off-site meetings. unfastened house Sessionss on KM. regular publication on the portal. studies. a KM newssheet. even bare-faced catchs. When. for case. WiseGuy completed its first twelvemonth. employees who logged on to their machines in the forenoon were surprised by a short 40-second picture embedded in an e-mail with bank manager Chanda Kochar presenting

a message on the value of KM. complimenting them and pressing them to utilize it more. It had the whole company speaking about it for yearss and successfully generated farther involvement in KM at ICICI Bank. However. user tools were kept comparatively free of catchy. gimmicky names in favor of simple. explanatory footings that explained their intent. For case. we eschewed names like Guru. Oracle. Solomon. Answer Point and any figure of tricky acronyms in favor of the simpler Query Board. Discussion Forum and E-Circulars.

This helped us to stand out from the crowd. Users. we feel. appreciated holding something apparent vanilla whose intent they could understand and associate to. The attention we took in selling was reflected in other ways. For case. early on the KM squad would utilize internal selling runs inspired by topical subjects. but this was stopped when we realised that it would non be relevant to everyone throughout India – allow entirely in London. Moscow and Toronto.

Challenges

The short history of KM in ICICI Bank has non been obviously sailing. Having a manager throw his weight behind the undertaking surely provided an initial push. It sent a positive signal across the administration that the top brass were serious about KM. but it besides ran the hazard of being perceived as a pet undertaking or spirit of the month.

While many employees actively use the portal. there are spreads in pockets among mid-level directors. ‘I know best’ and ‘not invented here’ attitudes remain a barrier. Knowledge sharing is non tightly linked to staff assessment and neither are knowledge direction activities mentioned in ICICI Bank’s balanced score card index – if it were. it may be a different affair.

Certain steps can be a double-edged blade. For case. one squad started an internal enterprise in which they asked squad members to subject suggestions. associating their engagement to public presentation indexs and doing it a portion of an employee’s compulsory ends. However. it was shortly ascertained and reported that some staff were taking thoughts from WiseGuy and subjecting them to their group system. Such cases undermine or detract from the overall procedure and can stoke internal struggle.

From a proficient position. the KM enterprises have done a better occupation of capturing internal and external unstructured information. such as paperss and thoughts and in tackling external structured informations such as content and databases versus internal structured informations. such as informations warehouses. enterprise resource-planning applications and databases. Disparate systems can make fatigue and/or confusion among users about which 1 to utilize.

First-generation KM revolved around making procedures to capture. codify and organize cognition for retrieval. In second-generation KM. cognition flows becomes more of import than the cognition itself. The 3rd coevals of KM involves easing the creative activity of new cognition. invention and bettering organizational public presentation. Maturity degrees vary harmonizing to the applications within each squads.

At ICICI Bank. the concern leading squad. by sponsorship and illustration. has outlined rules of action that stipulate that employees must actively portion cognition and seek out colleagues’ expertness to work out jobs and/or better procedures. KM at ICICI Bank was started in a non-dictatorial mode and its usage is voluntary. but a programme of this nature can non be expected to go on on impulse. But to the mean employee in the bank. KM now is no longer unusual or a freshness. but has become the ‘way we work’ .

So while we build for graduated table. we design for the psyche. The KM squad is encouraged to be open-minded. to convey in outside resources and to avoid being ego-driven – to happen solutions within merely. When this is done. it is a value arbitrage and a non cost arbitrage.

On many occasions it is non about KM scheme. but survival scheme. Simply guaranting that the proposals and undertakings see the visible radiation of the twenty-four hours. guaranting they are nurtured and survive initial incredulity and hiccoughs.

Finally. it is about velocity. about the young person and their energy. about coaction and co-operation.

Deepa Prabhu is the caput of cognition direction at ICICI Bank. She can be contacted at [ electronic mail protected ]

WiseGuy parts

WiseGuy has assisted the administration in a figure of ways. It has helped:

In the creative activity of a common depot of cognition ;
Staff place beginnings of in-house expertness ;
In the development of a sense of ‘belonging’ among staff ; Save the bank money ;
Better our employee’s decision-making ability ;
Empower staff ;
Supply a agency for staff to upgrade their accomplishments ;
Staff to be after their calling motions ;
Supply a platform for acknowledgment of parts made to the bank.

What works

What truly continues to work in favor of WiseGuy is the manner that it helps to prosecute employees. This is the consequence of the doctrine and direction patterns and little determinations taken on a daily. individual footing. Some penetrations may be capsulated as follows:

Listen. listen. listen. Then listen some more ;
Speed is of the kernel – lead. don’t follow ;
Keep the intrinsic organic nature and growing versus design and diktat ;
Don’t kill any thought – nevertheless little ;
Tap the corporate energy ;
Compassion and caring – most employees are fighting with personal issues of work-life balance and emphasis.
If KM helps diminish this. you have a convert ; Feeling implicit in concerns ;
Team work. every clip.