Knowledge Acquisition and Communities of Practice: An Approach to Convert Individual Knowledge into Multi-organizational Knowledge

The implementation of knowledge management mechanisms to convert individual knowledge into organizational knowledge is important to guarantee business success in the global and dynamic economy. Besides that, there is a trend in the software industry to create a consistent body of software process knowledge across different organizations through the conversion of organizational knowledge into multi- organizational knowledge. Since software organizations do not execute software processes in the same way, the creation of such body of knowledge is a difficult task. This work presents a knowledge acquisition approach aimed to acquire organization members’ knowledge and store it in a software process community of practice repository accessible through a Web-based system. The application and evaluation of knowledge captured in the context of a specific organization, and reuse of such knowledge in different contexts provides the means for converting organizational knowledge into multi-organizational knowledge.