Report from SEKE’99 panel on “From Software Experience Databases to Learning Organizations”

Knowledge management by experience databases (EXDBs) is gradually getting into use. This applies e.g. for banking, oil production and ship building, as well as for software engineering. The goal is to create and sustain a learning organization, where the ultimate success criterion (what is “improvement”) is satisfied customers in the spirit of TQM or ISO-9000. The SEKE’99 panel [6] focused on how software organizations can best systematize, organize and exploit previously collected experiences in order to improve their work. The learning perspective is crucial, both at the individual and organizational level. It is a challenge to make ”externalized” information – e.g. stored guidelines, process models and quality estimators – ”internalized”, i.e. to get it into active use by practitioners. Much too often, process quidelines in a quality system are ignored and even sabotaged by the rank-and-file. Such centralized guidelines are perceived as “control”, and this may hinder both individual and organizational learning. To successfully convert passive information (models etc.) into active, operational knowledge, we must mobilize insights from both software engineering, knowledge engineering and organizational sciences. Note, that there was a special workshop on “Learning Software Organizations” just before SEKE’99, where such issues were further discussed.