Analyzing knowledge management capabilities of software development companies in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Knowledge management (KM) has been the subject of much discussion over the past decade. Organizations have realized that they will not survive in the modern knowledge era unless they have a strategy for managing and leveraging value from their intellectual assets, and many KM lifecycles and strategies have been proposed. The term "Knowledge Management" has been applied to a very broad spectrum of activities designed to manage, exchange and create or enhance intellectual assets within an organization./ Software development is a mental exercise. Software is produced by human thoughts that cannot be controlled, gathered or accumulated in the same ways as with physical goods. Knowledge work is fundamentally different in character from physical labor. The thoughts will make the knowledge, which is the main asset for any software development company. Hence the way it is managed is of crucial importance towards avoiding the repetition of mistakes and effective use of existing know-how in value addition process. The capability to do so by individual companies will decide their survival on the competitive market. As an emerging industry in Sri Lanka, software companies should focus on the knowledge management capability./ This dissertation tries to analyze the capability of knowledge management of software development companies in four different aspects. Those are management focus, staff perception and attitude, internal process and available infrastructure. We wish to analyze those aspects in Sri Lankan context and give guidelines on managing the knowledge asset. The capability index is derived, after gathering the importance of each aspect by questioning the industry people. Also the current level of capability is assessed, with the use of a derived scale; hence it, gives an industry wide analysis.