Expliciting Knowledge

First the big news, I have quit ICICI Bank. I will be self employed for some time before the business grows and I can be an employer as well.

Sometime earlier this year I had decided to write down my experiences in the bank, and since at that point of time I did not foresee myself quitting immediately I did not put myself to do the task. Anyways I guess now is the right time, expect to find a series of sideways posts on the wayside bank.

Working at the bank one of the major time consuming activities used to be reporting data for various purposes. Most of the times it was for regulatory purposes but at times it related to the credit risk as well as business development indicators. The format for collecting the data was unique every time it was reported and almost always there was a feeling among the managers that it was a futile exercise. The main reason for this was that none of the data collation exercises was ever used by the relationship managers to guide them in business development. Collation of credit related data being any help to the credit managers in understanding the risk profile of the portfolio was anyways meaningless as the entity ‘portfolio’ was a) arbitrarily formed and b) quite fluid with companies changing hand every quarter.

So we had a situation where most of the knowledge was implicit and if at all there was an exercise to make it explicit, it was considered a waste of time as it was seldom used to arrive at new insights. Insights which would help the relationship manager take business development decisions or the credit manager to manage the portfolio risk.

Something was amiss and I never applied my mind to figure it out. If it’s alright for knowledge to be implicit in a corporate banking setup then there shouldn’t have been multiple data collation activities every week. And if it isn’t, by now they should have formalized the process to make sure that abstracting insights is the prime motive and equally importantly work is never repeated.

That the business development related knowledge is implicit is beyond all doubt, the credit related knowledge on the other hand is documented and presented on a periodic basis. This narrows down our question, is it necessary to have all the statistics in place related to the clients to take business development related decisions or is it alright to just have a feel of things based on the relationship experience with the Company.

I don’t know the answer, but whatever it is my personal opinion is that the power of data is over hyped and more often than not the real motive behind all data collection exercises is a lack of trust in the decision making of the foot soldier.