Lessons For the Morrow

On a sunny afternoon in October, a gathering of young entrepreneurs in Pune

witnessed an event that, at one level could be called the inaugural function of

TiE (The IndUS Entrepreneurs) in the city. But what, at a more important level,

could be seen as the dawn of a new era for entrepreneurs all over the country as

they struggle to keep their small start-ups afloat in the murky Information

Technology landscape. In what could well be considered as a welcome departure

for the whole industry, the workshop organizers stayed away from the

"beaten to death" themes of IT Services and IT enabled services and

focused instead on the emerging opportunity areas of knowledge management and

Bioinformatics.

KM: No longer a dream

A few years ago, when knowledge management had threatened to

take the world by storm and was the subject of several seminars, both

consultants and technologists had propagated the myth that KM solutions were

just one step more in the continuum of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW).

The alarms raised by organization behavior gurus and some spectacular early

failures soon threw KM from the peak of inflated expectations to the trough of

disillusionment and by the end of the last millennium, KM was being written off

as just one more fad that could never take off. In a similar vein, e-learning,

which was the great ten billion dollar dream for venture capitalists and

entrepreneurs alike, never really managed to win the hearts of corporate and

government spenders who continued to prefer the chalk and talk approach to

meeting the learning needs of their employees. Yet today, there are

opportunities for a second generation of companies to deliver value in the

knowledge management and e-learning domain and create profitable ventures in

this space.

The challenge lies in demonstrating how knowledge management

can deliver goods for the organization by systematically addressing each of the

following points:

• How to ensure that every customer or employee transaction
  
  that happens on a daily basis can become part of an institutional knowledge
  
  base?

• Why should the organization spend crores of rupees on a
  
  repetitive basis to train new employees in tools, technologies, and best
  
  practices only to lose the capability every time an employee walks out of
  
  the door?

• How can the organization prevent loss of revenue and
  
  goodwill with irate customers switching over to a competitor who provides
  
  apparently superior service?

Practitioners of knowledge management will vouch for the fact

that no effective KM system can be developed or implemented unless it addresses

all these and other organization-specific points. It has to do this using a

judicious mix of document management, electronic performance support systems,

e-learning content, delivery and learner management systems and last but not the

least, knowledge search engines, warehouses and knowledge mining tools.

The beauty of knowledge management is that it interfaces with

every enterprise initiative, be it ERP, SCM or CRM or even B2C, B2B and B2E

applications. In the current times, where supply of products and services is far

in excess of demand levels in every segment of the economy and switching costs

from one service provider to another is at an all-time low, the need for

precision in knowledge acquisition, storage, dissemination and usage will be

felt increasingly by all organizations. This area will continue to grow and gain

relevance in every business sector in the years to come.

Tapping the biotech opportunity

What is it that makes every Indian software czar believe that

biotech is the greatest opportunity and yet, one finds very few companies or

even venture capitalists making an entry into this segment? At the TiE event in

Pune, Anand Khandekar, one of the software veterans who now chairs the Biotech

Committee of one the Chambers of Commerce, was candid in his assessment that

investors and software chieftains alike have stayed away largely because of a

lack of understanding of the real potential of this segment.

There can be no better underlining of that reality than the

fact that after attending an erudite one hour session by three eminent speakers

on the topic, I myself find it difficult to put down in one simple paragraph

what entrepreneurs can hope to achieve in this segment.

Another predictable session in the TiE Event was the

intervention by two outstanding young VCs turned Investment Bankers, Ranu Vohra

of Avendus Capital and Rajesh Jog of Waygate Capital. Their advice to

entrepreneurs was a true reflection of the paradoxical situation that both VCs

and entrepreneurs find themselves in nowadays.

So what can budding entrepreneurs look forward to from VCs in

the months to come? As the environment gets murkier and the economic clouds show

no signs of lifting, it is likely that VCs will continue to shy away from early

stage investments and look for a management team with a proven success record

and ideally some revenues. I see a number of deals emanating where bright CEOs

will join forces with corporations on the decline and add the much needed image

and new ideas to make funding attractive from the private equity or even VC

viewpoint. If that doesn’t look very optimistic for the 20 year old

millionaire aspirant, I remember an evening when the one and only Kanwal Rekhi

was speaking to an even younger audience at TiE Mumbai on the same topic. A

young IIT student mentioned his great new dot-com idea to Kanwal and asked for

his advice. Kanwal’s advice: "Get back to class, finish your degree, get

some experience and then talk about starting new companies." Advice that

has almost a Nostradamus-like prescience for the current times!

Ganesh Natarajan is

deputy chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies and the global CEO of Zensar