Towards organisational learning enhancement: assessing software engineering practice

Abstract

 Purpose-Issues surrounding knowledge management, knowledge transfer and learning within organisations challenge continuity and resilience in the face of changing environments. While initiatives are principally applied within large organisations, there is scope to assess how the processes are handled within small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and to consider how they might be enhanced. This paper presents an evaluation of practice within an evolving software development unit to determine what has been learned and how the knowledge acquired has been utilised to further organisational development. These results provide the basis for the design and implementation of a proposed support tool to enhance professional practice.  Design/methodology/approach-A small software development unit, which has successfully delivered bespoke systems since its establishment a number of years ago, was selected for analysis. The unit operates as a team whose actions and behaviours were identified and validated by the following means: in-depth interviews were carried out with each member of the team to elicit an understanding of individual and collective development. Interview data were recorded and transcribed and subjected to qualitative analysis to identify key themes underpinning knowledge acquisition and utilisation. Samples of project documentation were scrutinised to corroborate interview data. After analysing the data, a focus-group meeting was held to validate the results and to generate further insights into learning within the team.  Findings-Qualitative analysis of the data revealed key changes in thinking and practice within the team as well as insight into the development of individual and collective contextual knowledge, tacit understanding and learning. This analysis informed the proposal of a bespoke, lightweight, web-based system to support knowledge capture and organisational learning (OL). This approach has the potential to promote resilience and to enhance practice in similar small or start-up enterprises.  Research limitations/implications-Purposeful sampling was used in selecting a small software development team. This enabled in-depth interviewing of all members of the team. This offered a rich environment from which to derive awareness and understanding of individual and collective knowledge acquisition and learning. Focusing on a single small enterprise limits the extent to which the

IT outsourcing, knowledge transfer and project transition phases

“…Recent KT literature suggests that KT perceptions can be shaped by many factors such as knowledge sharing hostility and cultural differences, and those factors can become barriers to KT (Fannoun and Kerins, 2019;Gou, 2019;Adeinat and Abdulfatah, 2019;Levallet and Chan, 2019). Overcoming the individual's personal perceptions and other knowledge-related barriers requires an open knowledge exchange through social interaction (Levallet and Chan, 2019).…”

Editorial

“…One mission of The Learning Organization ( TLO ) is to aid managers, teams and organizations to learn effectively. This special issue of TLO contains two articles that deal with this mission, one by Engström and Käkelä (2019) and the other by Fannoun and Kerins (2019). The paper “Early steps in learning about organizational learning in customizing settings: a communication perspective” (Engström and Käkelä, 2019) raises the importance of organizational learning in day-to-day operation of companies providing customized products and services under the uncertainty of not knowing what to produce in advance.…”

“…Understanding the process of learning from communications and the rationale behind them is crucial for managers attempting to build routines and procedures for enabling conditions for individuals to handle complex tasks through communications. The paper “Towards organisational learning enhancement: assessing software engineering practice” (Fannoun and Kerins, 2019) addresses the contribution of information technology by illustrating the benefits of Web-paged systems support knowledge capture and organizational learning. In the context of small software development unit, members face the pressure of performing a variety of tasks in different projects that are knowledge-intensive.…”

“…How to make a difference through organizational learning This special issue focuses on exploring the question of how to make a difference through organizational learning [1]. There are several approaches responding to this question, such as building innovation capacity by maintaining ambidexterity in organizational learning using bottom-up approach (Brix, 2019), learning through communication processes (Engström and Käkelä, 2019), enhancing organizational learning with software support systems (Fannoun and Kerins, 2019), creating organizational dynamic capabilities through knowing in practice established through microprocesses (Linden et al, 2019), developing a multi-level learning framework (Morland et al, 2019) and regenerating the learning organization (Pedler and Hsu, 2019).…”

The practitioner’s part in making a difference through organizational learning

“…As they conclude, suppliers aware of the important roles of communication and learning can win as markets move toward customer customization. Fannoun and Kerins (2019) in "Towards organizational learning enhancement: assessing software engineering practice" look more internally to the organization as they focus on the design of a tool to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with knowledge acquisition and learning. The authors create the empirical study with SMEs in the technology space because as they state, "despite SMEs' economic contribution, they lack KM and LO resources and this paper serves the field by proposing a lightweight, web-based systems to support KM and OL without placing onerous demands on practitioners' time" (p. 45).…”