Interactive Knowledge Asset Management: Acquiring and Disseminating Tacit Knowledge

This paper defines and validates a solution to support organizational learning through the interactive evolution of organizational knowledge. The approach includes mechanisms to acquire the experiences of individuals working in different teams and environments, combine them with the existing company's knowledge assets, and disseminate the evolved knowledge to all the project teams. This solution was validated in a controlled experiment involving junior engineers in a training course over a two-year period. The main objective of this experiment was to assess whether the proposed solution provides an effective learning environment to develop quality products. Results show that the approach helps engineers to improve their ability to learn and adopt new practices for software development, obtaining also high levels of quality in the products developed. These improvements are not immediate, however, so the benefits only become evident with time.