Acquiring Competitive Advantage through Effective Knowledge Sharing

Introduction

Software development companies are one of the major sources of knowledge creation and application in the IT industry. These companies mostly need to utilize and optimize the knowledge application in the development processes for several major reasons such as dealing with the rapid technology advances, maintaining progressive software products, satisfying the customers’ ever-growing needs, and sustaining the core operations. For gaining an effective competitive advantage, software development firms should be able to implement effective knowledge rotation and sharing mechanisms in the internal and external processes. The software firms have various processes and groups of employees in the business analysis, system analysis, system design, development, quality control, and maintenance activities for each of which there are specific knowledge sharing efforts, procedures and activities that need to be undertaken if such companies are going to acquire a sustainable competitive advantage over competitors. This chapter aims at providing the interested scholars and practitioners with the knowledge sharing efforts in the software development processes. It also discusses the issues about how the knowledge sharing efforts can have a deep impact on gaining competitive advantage in software development and provision in the competitive market.