Knowledge bridging Vs Code Sharing – Where are we?

Recently I read an article in ET about Knowledge Bridging – a technique of trying to solve complex problems in a field by using the knowledge from totally different fields.

This is the link ET was referring to.

People are trying to solve problems by getting out of their disciplines and innovate by drawing knowledge from unrelated disciplines. I pondered about Indian companies. Where do we stand? How much effectively we utilize knowledge here?

Let us think about what is happening in Indian IT Services industry. Many companies don’t even use the knowledge of the all the employees of the company itself to solve the issues. Most IT projects are run like small companies themselves with very little inter-team cooperation / sharing happening.

In most of the IT projects, effectively sharing code/ best practices within an organization itself is a huge challenge. Though the IT Services model spells that Clients own the code and any code sharing may have potential to bring IP issues, most of the development time is spent on mundane code which is not really involving the client’s proprietary business logic. The time spent by developers for fixing typical, day to day issues is very high. Developers face the same problems and do the same googling and waste lot of time. Any effective means of capturing these issues in an application and sharing it effectively will cut lot of inefficiency.

The best place to start is - monitoring the google searches made. From the Google URLs, Search terms can be extracted on a regular basis to add content to the Knowledge Management applications.(Those who make not-at-all-technical searches beware!!)

The linear growth model (More-people ==> More-revenues) brings enough headaches for the management to worry about in managing scale. Companies will be better off, if sharing is done in a better manner. Without effective sharing, project cost and risk is increased. Project teams lose an opportunity to add value to move up the chain [Instead of thinking how he can improve the calculation logic, this guy is more worried about fixing the “C” pointer issue – the same issue has been fixed by lot of guys before – will be fixed by lot of guys after..]

Dotnet IDE – Visual Studio 2005’s Code Snippets feature is a good way forward to organize frequently used code. MS provided Code blocks for some of the standard tasks in this. I believe it will be possible for developers to create their own snippets and share with others in the same organization. I will check out more on this and post any updates.