An event-driven language for cartographic modelling of knowledge in software development organisations

Abstract

With software engineering now being considered a fully-fledged knowledge industry in which the most valuable asset to an organisation is the knowledge held by its employees [BD08], high staff turnover rates are becoming increasingly worrying. If software engineering organisations are to maintain their competitive edge, they need to ensure that their intellectual capital continues to grow and is not lost as people move in and out of their employ.

In this paper, the authors present work involving the formalisation of a language that enables organisations to create and analyse

maps of their organisational knowledge. In a more elaborate version of the traditional yellow-pages approach utilised in the cartographic

school of thought, the proposed language models various relationships between knowledge assets, uses an event-driven mechanism

to determine who knows what within the organisation, and finally

provides metrics for detecting three types of risk related to knowledge management in modern software engineering. A three month

evaluation of the language is also outlined and results discussed.