Know-How Mapping – A Goal-Oriented Approach and Evaluation

Information system developers have to cope with a continually changing technological landscape. Knowing what each kind of technique or technology can do and how well they perform under various conditions constitute an important kind of know-how that systems professionals seek. In this paper, we claim that such know-how information can be structured as a map, so as to facilitate understanding and decision making about what technology to adopt or develop. Recent work has proposed to use a goal-oriented approach to address the challenge of constructing such a map. In this paper, we examine the hypothesis that a goal-oriented approach can be used for mapping and analyzing technological domains. First, we apply the approach to several domains, to verify the applicability and expressiveness of the approach. Second, we perform a feature-based analysis and examine the extent to which the approach addresses the desired characteristics of a know-how map. Third, we conduct a controlled experiment in which the comprehension of goal-oriented know-how maps in comparison to a textual summary from a literature review was examined. The evaluation results indicate that the goal-oriented know-how maps have sufficient expressiveness, are easy to read and understand, and address a number of desired characteristics.