Enabling the creation of knowledge about software assets

In most companies two factors play a crucial role: managing the knowledge that is necessary for doing business and managing the hardware and software infrastructure that supports the business processes. Usually, business processes and infrastructure are not optimally aligned. We investigate how principles from knowledge management can be applied to enable the creation, consolidation, conservation and continuous actualization of knowledge about valuable software systems (“software assets”) that are part of the infrastructure. Our point of departure is a generic framework for knowledge creation proposed by Von Krogh, Ichijo and Nonaka. We investigate the explicit and tacit knowledge about software assets that may exist in an organization and specialize the framework to obtain a strategy for creating new knowledge about these software assets. By applying this strategy, one can optimize the quality and the flexibility of the software assets while reducing costs.