K. Ananth Krishnan is chief technology officer of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.

How can large companies take advantage of the knowledge that is dispersed in various parts of their organizations? In an interview with MIT Sloan Management Review, K. Ananth Krishnan, chief technology officer of Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., offered an interesting perspective on that subject. Krishnan explained how he and his colleagues at Tata, which had $8.2 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, tap into the collective intelligence within their organization:

We are today probably one of the largest users of the social Web inside the enterprise…. In the last three years we have really launched into the exploitation of the social Web as a means for ideation, as a means of finding the expert, as a means of learning. We use the Web to form groups to look at specific problems and tapping into a collective intelligence….

For example, I have a blog inside the company, and I just finished writing a blog post which will go live tomorrow morning on the ideation process. There are a lot of things that I as the CTO of India’s largest software company should be looking at. Obviously, I don’t have the bandwidth to look at all of them. So I’m asking my readers to help me find out what am I missing. What are the three things they feel I should be paying attention to? Hopefully, I will get a few hundred responses, and then I and my staff will go through and make sure that we pick the top three from there.

I do this quite often to supplement what I’m reading from all the other sources of information. The kind of insights that our business leaders might need for creating a new service offering or going after a new market or whatever — many of those get validated by this softer data.

For more about Krishnan’s insights on managing information, read MIT SMR’s interview with him.

(Reprint #:52418)