Approach Note for Knowledge Management at IRMA

Submitted by: Priya Agarwal (p39043)| Aman Madnawat (p39121)| Chittesh Sachdeva (p39131)|
Mukul Verma (p39144)| Yuvraj Sharma (p39177)| Mrityunjay Panday (p39208)

All IRMA graduates spend approximately 7 weeks in the villages with an objective to
understand the villages in a better manner. This helps them come back to the coursework with
a nuanced understanding of the issues linked with the village life that are intertwined with each
other. Presently, students undertake a comprehensive survey that covers education,
governance, agriculture, health, income and expenditure, shock coping mechanisms, and
demographic details. This gives them an overview of the village life. Students prepare a report
and presentation that is presented in the institute. In this process, the knowledge created is
limited to student group and the faculty at IRMA. Neither the NGO nor the villagers nor the
external world is able to access the knowledge to better understand the village. Earlier the
reports used to be on a thematic paper, the students used to cover one field comprehensively.
A KM system would be able to assimilate the knowledge and make it easily accessible to
multiple stakeholders. By developing a KM system IRMA would be aggregating and
disseminating common themes coming out of the fieldwork and would gain credibility as its
resources would become basis for other researches.
The KM system can be implemented in the following stages:
 Phase 1: Digitization of reports and knowledge that is stored (Assimilation)
 Phase 2: Sharing between student body and IRMA faculty and standardizing the
processes. (Standardization)
 Phase 3: Sharing with external stakeholders. (Accessibility)
KM system should be mobile friendly, should aid social learning, should help in branding of
IRMA as a source that provides granular details at the grass root level, should help share data
faster, help fill knowledge gaps, and share best practices faster.
Multiple issues would be faced in implementing the KM system that includes digitization of
existing knowledge and index it with respect to village, district, state, topics covered, year,
writer, and theme. Presently, the reports are written in a standardized format. However, this
was not the case earlier when students used to work on different themes. (Thematic paper).
Creation of templates and standardized metrics to evaluate villages in order to avail easy data
sharing across villages would be a key issue. In addition, sharing of reports and increasing
accessibility to reports could lead to increased chances of plagiarism.
Readiness of host organizations, villages in providing actual data would also be put to test if
the reports became easily accessible to key decision makers and officials. Most organizations
might not like to share the data of villages with other organizations.
To measure effectiveness of the KM system equal value would be given to participation,
performance and value added. KM should have a balance of structured and unstructured
content.
Reasons for failure of KM system in IRMA would include inadequate support from
management, improper need assessment, and lack of willingness to share the tacit knowledge
at the institutional level. A proper KM system would help in sharing of best practices and the
building of consistent processes. It would help standardize the reports and provide students a
proper structure in how to evaluate a scenario and extract maximum knowledge.