In a bid to move faster, Wipro has cut down on the training time of its employees. As a result, a person who took around 30 days to get trained will now take around 22 days.

“Over the last 18 months, we have reduced the need for training by 80,000 days for over 10,000 people,” said Mr Ved Prakash, Chief Knowledge Officer, Global IT Business, Wipro Ltd.

knowledge management

This has been made possible because Wipro has improved upon its 12-year-old knowledge management (KM) initiatives so that people on the bench can enhance their knowledge and become productive much quicker when they get a new project.

Discussing the importance of KM, Mr Prakash said that Wipro first came up with its KM vision in 2000. “KM deals more with culture than technology,” he said, adding that it was being used increasingly by Wipro to upgrade skills. As an example, he said that a few years ago, a programmer who needed to know just Java programming now has to understand the business processes too.

In order to do this, Wipro employees who have domain expertise on a particular topic can name themselves as experts and help others gain knowledge of the subject.

TACKLE ATTRITION

Knowledge management can also help Wipro tackle attrition, said Mr Karthik Ananth, Director, Zinnov Management Consulting.

“This is a knowledge industry and companies don't want to lose out on what they have learnt,” he said. “IT service companies like Wipro, Infosys and TCS have done an excellent job with KM.”

For the quarter ended December 2011, Wipro had registered voluntary quarterly annualised attrition of 14.2 per cent against 21.7 per cent for the same quarter last year. TCS reported that attrition had fallen to 12.8 per cent.

balaji.n@thehindu.co.in

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