USING A SPREADSHEET FRAMEWORK IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING TEAMS

摘要

The Internet offered a new media for establishing communities of practice in knowledge management (KM) in the late 1990s. This paper describes a case study of how a business organization applied the spreadsheet as a framework for establishing KM in a large community of software engineering and development teams. The focus was to process information by communicating the status of complex software projects from multiple locations in order to meet quality criteria for in an international telecommunications corporation. Project status and consistent process assurance had to be tracked effectively, even if the projects integrated code from across the globe. This paper describes the stages of KM shown by the evolution of a process checklist into a web-based spreadsheet framework for project managers, systems engineers and process engineers to use when sharing data and information to improve procedures. Information management evolved without formal application of the discipline of KM. Perhaps because of its learning environment and KM, future process improvements and quality certifications will continue successfully with a focus on the development of quality knowledge as well as products.