Managing knowledge effectively is the key to success for a growing organization. Tata Steel started its Knowledge Management (KM) journey in 1999 during the fifth phase of its modernization known as ‘Modernization of Mind’. KM process in Tata Steel mainly works on three basic strategies (as mentioned below) which have gradually evolved.

1. Codification Strategy (converting tacit to explicit): Designed to capture the tacit knowledge of employees working across the organization through KM portal. This is done through Knowledge contributions, Ask Expert queries etc.
   
   
2. Personalization Strategy (tacit to tacit knowledge sharing):  This has helped in converting individual knowledge into organizational knowledge. The key success factors in this strategy are -
   
   
   1. Knowledge Community: Started in the year 2001-02. It consists of groups of executives belonging to similar functional areas. This transcends administrative boundaries and the members work towards collection and application of Best Practices for the process which otherwise may have resided in silos.
      
      
   2. Knowledge Manthan: An innovative initiative started in year 2004, focusing on involving shop floor employees in a common knowledge sharing platform. Employees from various departments participate, discuss and share their knowledge on a specified theme (communicated in advance) either through ‘Story-telling’ method or in a workshop mode.
      
      
3. Knowledge Diffusion: This is a strategy to disseminate the captured knowledge for converting it into actions. A process called MASS (Manthan Ab Shop-floor Se) – was launched in August 2005 and is being used to equip shop-floor employees with the ability to harvest available “tacit” and “explicit” knowledge and convert the same into actions.

Our efforts are being acknowledged globally and we have been receiving the MAKE recognition (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise) at Indian, Asian and Global level for the past few years.

For more details on Knowledge Management please visit:
http://www.tatasteel.com/technologyupdate/km/default.htm