ICICI Bank Case Study : KM tigers

ICICI Bank has grown six-fold since its KM strategy was established in 2000, making it the
second biggest in India today. But that strategy has been robust enough to grow with it. Central
to ICICI Banks success has been its flexible, innovative methods, and a plethora of KM tools
that were cannily marketed to staff from the very start.
ICICI was founded in the mid-1950s at the behest of the World Bank, the Indian government and
various captains of industry in India. Its purpose back then was to provide medium and longterm development finance for Indian business.
In the mid-1990s its business strategy shifted to take advantage of the opening up of the Indian
economy. 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 1994 to provide retail banking facilities across India.
The idea was well timed and proved wildly successful. Today, it is the second largest bank in
India with assets of almost $40bn and can boast a network of more than 570 branches and a
steadily growing international business, with branches in the UK, Russia and Canada.
First steps
ICICI Banks knowledge management (KM) strategy was established in 2000. Back then, the
company was very much smaller than it is now just 1,200 staff compared to the 30,000 that
work for ICICI Bank today.
However, the programme was started at a time when the companys growth was starting to go
into 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 off or view their personal pension details.
By putting these simple, but necessary activities on the intranet, it encouraged employees to get
familiar 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 a
space on the intranet where they could participate in collaborative activities, such as contribute
or find documents, engage in discussions and post or answer queries. That idea, in essence, first
converted the bank to KM.
Initially, the organisation was motivated to act due to the upheaval caused by the tail-end of the
dot-com boom, which was depriving the bank of many good staff as they left in significant
numbers to join dot-com start-ups taking their knowledge and know-how with them. We

therefore developed WiseGuy, ICICIs KM intranet portal easily accessible from the main staff
portal 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 research
with a brief to just do it. Indeed they did and a beta version was ready within just three months.
Before the year was out, faced with the prospect of a reverse merger of ICICI Bank with its
parent ICICI, which went through in 2002, the KM team had to restructure to meet the needs of
the new corporate 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;
5. How to ensure that every person in the company is adequately equipped with the skills
and training 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 and
share knowledge? That is to say, how do we create the culture? The aim was to ensure that
employees stayed permanently aware of the external competitive challenges of the business, and
to 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 vehicle
to support three major information-handling behaviours: sharing, collaboration and self-help. In
essence, the workplace is no longer just a physical location. It has become a blend of physical
and virtual spaces in which work is undertaken.
The KM programme is now deeply embedded in the bank, but not as a result of any directive
from top management. Employees work with the KM programme because they see its benefits
and realise the value it brings to them on a day-to-day basis. This is what makes it vibrant and
engaging.
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 600 locations, 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 or
guidelines.

The importance of scalability cannot be underestimated. In 2005, usage increased more than six
times compared to the year before and the portal marked a record one-million logins in
November 2004 after the site was redesigned. The number of staff using the KM portal doubled
in the same period.
On average today, about 6,000 users visit the site daily, of which 95 per cent come from ICICI
Banks retail branches. And more than 40 business divisions actively participate in the KM effort
to contribute 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
various business groups and group companies, complete employee information; and, interactive
sections such as discussion forums, query boards, book reviews, online quizzes, the rewards and
recognition scheme, and so on.
Wise Wednesdays
Early on, we realised that several senior people were reluctant to type and post submissions to
the portal. So we invited them to share their tacit knowledge in an informal manner and the
WiseGuy Knowledge Leader Series (KLS) was born.
Guest speakers included experts on various topics, such as advanced finance, and internal
business heads who were delighted to be invited and were willing to give it a try. KLS evolved to
include even chief the financial officers and CEOs of renowned companies in India, who have
spoken on the topics of leadership and strategy.
Called Wise Wednesdays, we have conducted more than 60 KLS in various formats over a
period of three years from 2001 to 2004. It contributed immensely to our WiseGuy brand and
really helped 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 canteen
of our Mumbai headquarters. Similarly, we tried a variety of other formats, including informal
brown bag concepts, in which staff would be invited to bring their lunch along to a presentation
on a particular subject by a notable individual, to web conferences and live webcasts, so that any
user in any location could participate. KLS encouraged face-to-face, live interaction and KM was
therefore not seen purely as a portal activity.
Not all of these were successful. For example, our knowledge cafes had to be abandoned because
the 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 presenting
about weighty topics.
Corporate learning

The ability to learn across the group and from team mates is a very powerful tool. We aim to
build a 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 is new 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 KM
initiatives. When we polled staff, almost 97 per cent said that The Daily Dose represents an
important part of their working day. By delivering it direct to their mailbox, it helps the KM team
to capture 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 are
published. Here, staff can look up all the newsletters published by internal business groups,
media releases, as well as tracking what our competitors are up to. Then there are K-mailers,
which are short, one-page reviews on any one of 33 topics in six categories; internal newsletters
from various 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
where they can post any work-related queries, such as the number of cheques that can be
deposited at any one time, customer credit questions, cheque returns and so on.
Indeed, anything work-related that demands authoritative responses from colleagues and inhouse experts. 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, the average response time to a query ranges from five to 15 minutes, but never
more than one day from the time the query was posted.
In addition to Query Board, we also offer a more general discussion forum on the intranet where
staff can talk about finance, business and economy-related topics. Discussions on our forum
revolve around topics highly relevant to the work in the bank, such as the automatic cheque book
re-order system and solutions for detecting fake bank notes.
Managing documents on WiseGuy
The digital assets on WiseGuy represent a vital element of our KM programme. WiseGuys
document-management system offers a managed view into otherwise overwhelming 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 can
contribute their own documents, define them, schedule updates and so on. Furthermore, the
portal manager 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 three
clicks, or less than a minute of searching. Other key features include easy identification of
documents by author, date, posted comments and even queries.
The system helps to preserve the organisations intellectual capital, as it is able to capture
information so that it is not lost even when a person leaves the organisation. To encourage
participation, sticky features on the portal include opinion polls, cartoons, tips, word of the day
and 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
tools are supported on a variety of standard hardware and software platforms, particularly
Microsoft Windows, Linux, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice (the open-source alternative to
Microsoft Office), and a 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 combination
of many experiments and modular launches. This means that we nurtured what worked and
discarded 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, of
course, are quite common KM tools, helping put staff in direct contact with one another. The
result, Peoplefinder, is the experts directory that employees use to locate others and update their
own profile with interests, areas of expertise where they can help colleagues and other relevant
information. Creating it was like opening the doors and windows in a dusty house shut for many
months as people who did not even know who was sitting on the same floor as them suddenly
got connected 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 in
which employees who are also customers of the bank can talk directly with the product and
process teams for personal banking issues. With a back-end plug-in to the call centre it serves the
dual purpose of learning while solving problems. It was so effective that it was replicated for
other teams too.
Compliance, quality and customer service
In 2002, the bank launched its quality programme to achieve the relevant certification levels
throughout the organisation. Naturally, KMs role was to support the quality team and we did this
by 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 organisations endeavours in maintaining quality levels.
Staff can 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 who
deal directly with the public can share almost everything related to customer complaints and

service quality issues, from branch and customer satisfaction with cash machines, to standard
templates, letters, tools, to recognising and celebrating customer satisfaction benchmarks and
people who have achieved it. The various activities, contributions and postings help spread the
good practices throughout the bank.
Of course, banks today have to deal with growing regulatory demands, including circulars and
notices from the regulatory authorities that must be followed to the letter. We therefore created ECirculars to inform and educate staff on regulatory and compliance matters. It is used by
designated senior managers who have a duty to inform employees on guidelines issued by
various regulatory authorities as they affect the banks policies, products and processes. It is not
all one-way. Recipients can also be tested with four or five key questions to ensure that they
broadly understand 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 of
techniques or practices. If that were so, it would not have been difficult for other manufacturers
to copy the Toyota Production System, for example, even though the details have been relayed in
books and Toyota even gives tours of its manufacturing facilities it is no secret. The difference
is in its philosophy and perspective about such things as people, processes, quality, continuous
improvement and other factors that represents not just the surface what you can see but the
inner soul.
This has become increasingly relevant with the realisation that few jobs are well structured or
well defined. Instead, knowledge work is defined at the point of need by the issues, problems or
opportunities that arise. Researchers and authors Pfeffer and Sutton asked why it was that with so
much 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
knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behaviour consistent
with that knowledge.
This is what they called the knowing-doing gap. Their study analysed how some organisations
are consistently able to turn knowledge into action while others fail. Their findings suggest that it
is management practices that either create or reduce the knowing-doing gap. In our work, the
KM team used their insights as a guiding philosophy.
Rather than waiting for culture to change, we banked on change impacting the culture. We tried
to make it fun and prestigious and persuaded leaders to champion our KM efforts. In
experimenting with so many new things and new ways of doing old things, risk taking was
encouraged and mistakes 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 details gives 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 on the intranet is dedicated to the knowledge champions, displaying the top contributors
based on their knowledge quotient. This KQ is also prominently displayed on their home page
next to a personalised welcome message. K-Cash, an earlier version of the rewards scheme,
enabled employees to redeem gift vouchers online for the points they earned. And knowledge
leaders who spoke in the Knowledge Leader Series, as well as knowledge champions, were given
certificates signed 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 us evangelise our work. Then there were mailers,
posters, group presentations, off-site meetings, open house sessions on KM, regular publishing
on the portal, surveys, a KM newsletter, even bare-faced gimmicks. When, for instance,
WiseGuy completed its first year, employees who logged on to their machines in the morning
were surprised by a short 40-second video embedded in an e-mail with bank director Chanda
Kochar delivering
a message on the value of KM, congratulating them and urging them to use it more. It had the
whole company talking about it for days and successfully generated further interest in KM at
ICICI Bank. 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 Query Board, Discussion Forum and E-Circulars.
This helped us to stand out from the crowd. Users, we feel, appreciated having something plain
vanilla whose purpose they could understand and relate to. The care we took in marketing was
reflected in other ways. For instance, early on the KM team would use internal marketing
campaigns inspired by topical themes, but this was stopped when we realised that it would not be
relevant 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 his
weight behind the project certainly provided an initial thrust. It sent a positive signal across the
organisation that the top brass were serious about KM, but it also ran the risk of being perceived
as a pet project or flavour of the month.
While many employees actively use the portal, there are gaps in pockets among mid-level
managers. I know best and not invented here attitudes remain a barrier. Knowledge sharing is
not tightly linked to staff appraisal and neither are knowledge management activities mentioned
in ICICI 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 internal
initiative in which they asked team members to submit suggestions, linking their participation to
performance indicators and making it a part of an employees mandatory goals. However, it was
soon observed and reported that some staff were taking ideas from WiseGuy and submitting

them to their group system. Such instances undermine or detract from the overall process and can
stoke internal conflict.
From a technical perspective, the KM initiatives have done a better job of capturing internal and
external unstructured information, such as documents and ideas and in harnessing external
structured data such as content and databases versus internal structured data, such as data
warehouses, enterprise resource-planning applications and databases. Disparate systems can
create 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 the knowledge itself. The third generation of KM involves easing the creation of new
knowledge, innovation and improving organisational performance. Maturity levels vary
according to the applications within each teams.
At ICICI Bank, the business leadership team, by sponsorship and example, has outlined
principles of action that stipulate that employees must actively share knowledge and seek out
colleagues expertise 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 to continue on momentum. But to the average employee in the bank, KM now is no
longer strange or a 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 openminded, 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 the
proposals and projects see the light of the day, ensuring they are nurtured and survive initial
skepticism 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 contacted at
deepa.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.

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.

Case Study : Savvy HR saves ICICI Bank Rs 100 cr

BEST PRACTICE: The trick is to adopt a profit-centre approach, quantify
targets and deliver results.
It's time to acknowledge that human resource departments are also profit centres in their own
right. ICICI Bank's HR department has been leading the way in delivering key revenue targets.
"If you look at our entire HR system"" sourcing, training and managing information system"" we
should deliver 8 to 10 per cent of the cost budget every year, by running our HR programmes and
recruitments in a tight manner," says K. Ramkumar, group chief HR officer, ICICI Bank.
At the core of this achievement is the forecasting technique used by the HR team, which seeks to
achieve accurate results each month. Industry analysts estimate that this could amount to a
saving of over Rs 100 crore a year.
The bank's HR team forecasts attrition by doing three things. In the third week of every month, it
holds a forecasting meeting where projections are made for resource needs for the following
three months.
The need for the following month is made in a more concrete manner to take care of immediate
requirements and for the other two months it's more of a sizing exercise to forecast need.
"We take inputs every month on market trends to figure out what kind of candidates other banks
and insurance companies are recruiting. We also look at the retail plans, if for instance a WalMart has entered the scene or a Deutsche Bank is getting into retail banking, or if another player
is increasing its capacity. These would have an impact in the market," says Ramkumar.
After this assessment, the bank classifies attrition rates into high, medium and low (above 25 per
cent is high, 12 - 25 per cent is medium and below 12 per cent is low). It also classifies attrition
into 'critical' and 'non-critical' and by geography.
"Their bonus is linked to the quality of the forecast. If our team manages an 85 per cent accuracy
in their forecast, then it's fine," says Ramkumar.
The inspiration comes from Dr Eliyahu Goldratt, who held a session with the bank over two
years ago. "The principles of production and supply chain management can be put to work for
HR. We always keep a nominal constraint of around 5-7 per cent in the supply of human
resources, as this forces the system to innovate and deliver its best," says Ramkumar. If the
system has 90 per cent capacity, it's a comfortable situation.
This has worked well, as opposed to benching, as ICICI Bank typically puts its new recruits
though a mandatory four-week induction session. "This is almost like a bench for us, but not
really, as it gears the people towards their goals and challenges," he says.
Moreover, if benching had been adopted, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that

employee costs would amount to Rs 3 to 5 crore a month for just 1,000 people (the bank hires
1,500 people a month).
This calculation shows that the cost rises to Rs 15 crore for one quarter, or Rs 60 crore for four
quarters.
"Why must we carry this extra cost by benching? It's fairly easy to pick up jobs at the lower
level, but more difficult for niche jobs at the middle to senior level. Besides, niche jobs account
for only 500 positions, and internally we have an agreement that whenever attrition happens at
those levels, we keep our system and training geared and move people up with allied skillsets
from within," he says.
Such measures involving forecasting and working with a deliberate marginal constraint in the
system are paying off in monetary terms as well.
"We are like cost managers in a sense and 20 per cent of our bonus comes from saving on costs,"
says Ramkumar. That's how the HR departments delivers 8 to 10 per cent of the cost budget
every year.
In an attempt to professionalise the forecasting system, Ramkumar has even hired a former air
traffic controller from the Indian Navy.
He says that if Heathrow Airport sees a flight land every 30 seconds, then surely an organisation
should be able to calculate its needs. "The attempt is to be scientific and not run this operation
like a quack."