Design and develop of a knowledge management tool for a technical services firm.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to design and develop a Knowledge Management Tool for use by COVAE Uganda Limited to manage its knowledge assets and artifacts to achieve organisational goals and competitive advantage. A knowledge management tool focusing on the discovery, capturing, sharing and utilising by optimising the firm’s available knowledge assets was developed. This development was guided by the process of Knowledge Mapping by identifying knowledge assets required for the various activities carried out to meet customers’ requirements. The Knowledge Map enabled the identification of Knowledge gaps in people, processes and technology by mapping the organisation as knowledge centres and identification of the knowledge required to perform all activities carried out at the firm. The results from the knowledge mapping exercise were used in conjunction with the System Development Life Cycle to develop a web-based system consisting of containerised microservices server-side and an angular client-side web application as the front end. The resultant web-based system prototype was a cloud-native application consisting of a knowledge base module as the data storage module for both tacit and explicit knowledge, and a competence management module to actively manage people carrying out organisational activities together with their competencies, all as knowledge assets. It is recommended that with this prototype, rigorous testing to allow continuous improvement and workflow configuration can be carried out to achieve long-term improved organisational performance.