Fundamental Questions Related to Storing and Sharing Knowledge Items

Any approach that intends to capture, store, and disseminate knowledge items must address some fundamental questions:

1. Assuming that individuals have personal knowledge repositories, how can these repositories be shared? One approach would be to change the corporate culture and allow co-workers to search each other’s personal repositories. While this might be a viable solution in some cases, especially where one employee is a back up for another employee, it is not a generally viable solution due to other problems. One such problem is that personal repositories often contain items that are not of general interest. Another issue is that some kind of information filtering would be needed. In some cases, filtering might not be sufficient and some kind of packaging would be necessary so that the content becomes useful for a third party.

2. How can the common repository be populated? One answer is to enable employees to contribute from their personal repositories. This is a relatively simple problem from a technology point of view, because employees are asked to share something they already have. However, it might raise a psychological issue if people do not want to give away their personal knowledge. Moreover, if employees are asked first to capture their own knowledge and then to share it, the request is likely to encounter resistance. An example is asking employees to share their lessons learned, which would not be hard to do had they already collected these lessons.

3. How must the common (organizational) repository be organized so that it provides easy search and retrieval of knowledge items? There are many different approaches for organizing knowledge items. Some are based on AI techniques (such as case-based reasoning), some are based on advanced probabilistic indexing techniques, and others are based on a combination of manual and automatic generation of taxonomies.

4. How can people be persuaded to use the repository? In many cases this is more a cultural problem than a technological one. Software reuse, for example, is a cultural problem because software engineers do not trust code developed by others. Another issue is that in many organizational settings it is easier to find someone to ask for a solution instead of searching in repositories for answers. A third problem is having empty repositories. Inherently, any repository is nearly empty when first introduced, which gives potential users the perception that the repository and the whole initiative of sharing are worthless. This, in turn, prevents them from adding to the repository, because nobody wants to add items to something that is perceived as worthless.

5. How are contributions from users collected so that the repository evolves? Feedback from users is essential for improving the repository and the process.

6. How are usage and content of the repository analyzed and how can new knowledge be synthesized, based on this analysis? The initial seed of a repository is likely to be relatively raw material. Raw material would be lessons learned, incident reports, defect reports, project post-mortems, frequently asked questions with answers, results from projects, etc. While this raw material is useful by itself, it is also desirable to analyze and synthesize it into more refined knowledge items.

Source: Knowledge Management in Software Engineering