Gamification of Knowledge Management System: A Framework to Incentivize Knowledge Sharing for the Software Industry

A knowledge management system (KMS) is used as a tool by organizations to help organize documented organizational knowledge. This tool is used across the company by various stakeholders, such as mainly the employees and customers, to find their answers to their questions about the organization's know-how. The knowledge management system is, therefore, a very indispensable tool of every software company. However, many such systems are proved ineffective due to a lack of motivation from employees either in using the system or in maintaining the system. Therefore, the aim of this research is to critically analyze the knowledge management systems used by software companies in Mauritius and provide a model or framework for the gamification of a KMS that will help incentivize knowledge management and knowledge sharing to increase the effectiveness of a KMS. A quantitative method will mainly be adopted in this research. The target population will be the stakeholders involved in software development, such as software developers, software testers, team leads, and project managers. Data collected via the surveys will be analyzed to have an in depth review of the KMS and what challenges the software industry of Mauritius is facing with respect to knowledge management and how can some of these challenges be addressed. A total of 173 responses were received from various software firms. Among those respondents, 85% agreed that they were not motivated to participate in knowledge management and 94.8% believed that a gamification framework would be beneficial to boost user engagement in knowledge management systems.