Managing Knowledge as Business Rules

In today’s business environment, it is a certainty that will manage to survive especially those organizations which are striving to adapt quickly and with low costs to the new demands of market competition. Knowledge represented by internal business rules of an organization can help crystallize their orientation in order to ensure a competitive advantage in the market. In this context and in a relatively short time, a new trend in software development has arisen, ex-tending current methods and putting a strong emphasis on business rules. This article outlines the importance of managing business rules in an organized manner using dedicated software products and furthermore presents a general prototype for a business rules repository.Business Rules, Management, Knowledge, Rule Engine, Repository Prototype

A Model for Capturing and Managing Software Engineering Knowledge and Experience

During software development projects there is always a particular working "product" that is generated but rarely managed: the knowledge and experience that team members acquire. This knowledge and experience, if conveniently managed, can be reused in future software projects and be the basis for process improvement initiatives. In this paper we present a model for managing the knowledge and experience team members acquire during software development projects in a non-disruptive way, by integrating its management into daily project activities. The purpose of the model is to identify and capture this knowledge and experience in order to derive lessons learned and proposals for best practices that enable an organization to preserve them for future use, and support software process improvement activities. The main contribution of the model is that it enables an organization to consider knowledge and experience management activities as an integral part of its software projects, instead of being considered, as it was until now, as a follow-up activity that is (infrequently) carried out after the end of the projects

Looking for Reasons behind Success in Dealing with Requirements Change

During development, requirements of software systems are subject to change. Unfortunately, managing changing requirements can take a lot of time and effort. Yet some companies show a better management of changes in requirements than others. Why? What is it that makes some projects deal with changing requirements better than others? We pursue the long term goal of understanding the mechanisms used to successfully deal with change in requirements. In this paper we gather knowledge about the state-of-the-art and the state-of-practice. We studied eight software development projects in four different companies --large and small, inclined toward structured and toward agile principles of development--, interviewing their project managers and analyzing their answers. Our findings include a list of practical (rather than theoretical) factors affecting the ability to cope with small changes in requirements. Results suggest a central role of size as a factor determining the flexibility showed either by the organization or by the software development team. We report the research method used and validate our results via expert interviews, who could relate to our findings

Placing the Networks on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities for Managing in Developing Asia

Placing the networks on the Web poses a fundamental challenge, but also provides new opportunities for managing in Developing Asia. There is a huge efficiency gap between the region's manufacturing systems and the management of complementary, knowledge-intensive support services. The challenge is to reduce this gap as quickly as possible by embracing the Internet as a core business function, despite a weak base of accumulated knowledge of how to manage IT-based information systems. Asian companies, even the best, lag substantially behind their American and European counterparts. There is a potential vicious circle that needs to be broken: a belated transition to IT-based information systems has prevented the accumulation of knowledge, through trial-and-error, of how to design and implement an appropriate IT organization that reflects the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of diverse Asian management systems. Limited resources prevent any attempt to address these problems in a big leap forward. This implies that in-house efforts need to be supplemented with outsourcing of IT services. There is also a need for strategic partnering with major suppliers of Internet software and networking equipment. The opportunity is that the Internet provides almost unlimited opportunities for the outsourcing of mission-critical support services, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), HRM (human resource management). Furthermore, fierce competition among major producers of Internet software and networking equipment has created a buyers' market - placing Asian firms in a reasonably strong bargaining position. These developments are generally not well covered by existing studies, which are primarily focused on developments in the U.S. and Europe. The paper tries to fill this gap, and explores how placing global production networks on the Web affects managing in Developing Asia. A conceptual framework is introduced in parts 1 to 3. That framework is then applied to one of the role models of managing in Asia, Taiwan's Acer Group. Part 1 introduces a taxonomy of expected benefits from Internet-enabled transformations of business organization. In part 2, we argue that the real issue is to analyze how the Internet reshapes the organization of global production networks. In part3, we access conflicting claims on how an increased use of the Internet to manage global production networks affects international knowledge diffusion. In part 4, the example of Taiwan's Acer Group is used to describe the challenge for Asian firms to embrace the Internet as a key management function. And in part 5, we ask what Acer's experience tells us about Developing Asia's opportunities.

Implicit thinking knowledge injection framework for Agile requirements engineering

Agile has become commonly used as a software development methodology and its success depends on face-to-face communication of software developers and the faster software product delivery. Implicit thinking knowledge has considered as a very significant for organization self-learning. The main goal of paying attention to managing the implicit thinking knowledge is to retrieve valuable information of how the software is developed. However, requirements documentation is a challenging task for Agile software engineers. The current Agile requirements documentation does not incorporate the implicit thinking knowledge with the values it intends to achieve in the software project. This research addresses this issue and introduce a framework assists to inject the implicit thinking knowledge in Agile requirements engineering. An experiment used a survey questionnaire and case study of real project implemented for the framework evaluation. The results show that the framework enables software engineers to share and document their implicit thinking knowledge during Agile requirements documentation

MASK-SM : multi-agent system based knowledge management system to support knowledge sharing of software maintenance knowledge environment.

Knowledge management (KM) has become an important topic as organizations wish to take advantage of the information that they produce and that can be brought to bear on present decisions. This paper described a system to manage the information and knowledge generated during the software maintenance process (SMP). Knowledge Management System (KMS) is utilizing to help employees build a shared vision, since the same codification is used and misunderstanding in staff communications may be avoided. The architecture of the system is formed from a set of agent communities each community of practice(CoP) is in charge of managing a specific type of knowledge. The agents can learn from previous experience and share their knowledge with other agents or communities in a group of multi-agent system (MAS). This paper also described on the theoretical concept and approach of multi-agent technology framework that could be implemented software maintenance process (SMP) in order to facilitate knowledge sharing among the maintainers of the learning organization. as well as to demonstrate it into the system wise, on how the multi-agent technology could be utilized in the software maintenance process (SMP) system model for serving the maintainer that is developed by using groupware such as Lotus Notes software. This architecture will be named as MASK-SM (MAS Architecture to Facilitate Knowledge Sharing of Software Maintenance). The author followed the Prometheus methodology to design the MAS architecture. This paper applied the definition of ISO 9241-11 (1998) that examines effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. The emphasis will be given to the software maintenance process (SMP) activities that may concern with multi-agent technology to help the maintainers especially in learning organization to work collaboratively including critical success factor in order to ensure that software maintenance process (SMP) initiatives would be delivered competitive advantage for the community of practice(CoP) as well as users of the organization

The impact of human capital outsourcing on human capital management practices in Karachi pharmaceutical industry

Purpose: The aim of this research is to examine relationship between Human Capital Management (HRM) and Human Resource (HR) Outsourcing in the Pharmaceutical sector. The specific objective is to find out that how important is HRM for an Organization to perform its operations more efficiently, and at what level Human Resource Outsourcing is affecting it. Literature review: Literature review shows that HR outsourcing has positive impact on HRM for an Organization to perform its operations more efficiently. Methods: In order to conduct this research the methodology that has been used is quantitative in nature and closed ended Questionnaire was used to collect data. The universe of study was the employees of Pharmaceutical industry in Karachi Pakistan. The responses of each respondent were thoroughly analyzed by using SPSS software, and the results show that there is a negative relationship between the Human Capital Management (Gaining Knowledge, Current Trend of Business Environment, Organization Managing Their Human Asset and Practices and Policies Regarding Human Resource) and HR Outsourcing. Conclusions: It is concluded that all Independent Variables have the strongest Positive correlation with each other. There are lots of constraints, which any organization faces in terms of time, finance and, in some cases factors like strategic focus.Human Capital Management, Karachi, Pharmaceutical, Outsourcing

Regression Analysis on Experience Based Factory Model for Software Development Process

Software organizations are still struggling to reuse the best of their knowledge and experiences in future projects. Often, when there are changes on employee re-assignment, a lot of time and effort are spent for knowledge transfer activities. This however may not assure that all knowledge and experiences are well transferred and shared; some could be missing or misplaced. In this study, a model has been proposed for managing knowledge and experiences based on experience factory approach to provide a more efficient and effective experience management for software development community. Experience Factory is an infrastructure that aims for reuse of products, processes and experiences gained during a system life cycle. A set of components have been identified as the predictors of the model which eventually forms the two main organizations: project organization and experience factory organization. This study further has gone through a correlational survey research to verify the relationship between the identified predictors towards the experience factory goals. Reliability analysis has been conducted to validate the measures, while correlation and regression analyses have been carried out to examine the relationship between the constructs and the goals. Results reveal that reliability of the model is high and construct validity is satisfactory. Experience factory organization is found having more positively significant towards experience goals as compared to project organization; however, there is no significant impact towards the model due to inexistence of causal relation

Organizational Change Perspectives on Software Process Improvement

Many software organizations have engaged in Software Process Improvement (SPI) and experienced the challenges related to managing such complex organizational change efforts. As a result, there is an increasing body of research investigating change management in SPI. To provide an overview of what we know and don’t know about SPI as organizational change, this paper addresses the following question: What are the dominant perspectives on SPI as organizational change in the literature and how is this knowledge presented and published? All journals on the AIS ranking list were screened to identify relevant articles and Gareth Morgan’s organizational metaphors (1996) were used to analyze this literature considering the following dimensions of each article: organizational perspective (metaphor), knowledge orientation (normative versus descriptive), theoretical emphasis (high versus low), main audience (practitioner versus academic), geographical origin (Scandinavia, the Americas, Europe, or the Asia-Pacific), and publication level (high versus low ranked journal). The review demonstrates that the literature on SPI as organizational change is firmly grounded in both theory and practice, and Scandinavia and the Americas are the main contributors to this research. The distribution of articles across Morgan’s metaphors is uneven and reveals knowledge gaps that present new avenues for research. The current literature offers important insights into organizational change in SPI from machine, organism, and brain perspectives. Practitioners may use these articles as a guide to SPI insights relevant to their improvement initiatives. In contrast, the impact of culture, dominance, psychic prison, flux and transformation, and politics in SPI have only received scant attention. We argue that these perspectives offer important insights into the challenges involved in managing change in SPI. Researchers are therefore advised to engage in new SPI research based on one or more of these perspectives. Overall, the paper provides a roadmap to help identify insights and specific articles related to SPI as organizational change.Software Process Improvement; Organizational Change; Organizational Metaphors; Images of Organization; Literature Review

Knowledge Audit Model for Requirement Elicitation Process

Knowledge plays an important role to the success of any organization. Software development organizations are highly knowledge-intensive organizations especially in their Requirement Elicitation Process (REP). There are several problems regarding communicating and using the knowledge in REP such as misunderstanding, being out of scope, conflicting information and changes of requirements. All of these problems occurred in transmitting the requirements knowledge during REP. Several researches have been done in REP in order to solve the problem towards requirements. Knowledge Audit (KA) approaches were proposed in order to solve managing knowledge in human resources, financial, and manufacturing. There is lack of study applying the KA in requirements elicitation process. Therefore, this paper proposes a KA model for REP in supporting to acquire good requirements