http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/sgasson

Dr Susan GassonAssociate Professorthe iSchool at Drexel

Situated Knowledge Management In Collaboration

Across Organizational Boundaries

Dr. Susan Gasson, 2006

• Stakeholders from multiple business areas with little shared knowledge or expertise, manage emergent knowledge processes (Markus et al, 2000), that:– Involve an unpredictable set of organizational actors– Have dynamic boundaries and

emergent outcomes– Lack clear criteria for success.

• This results in partial individual knowledge of organizational processes, shared imperfectly.

Knowledge Management As The Assembly of Partial Perspectives

Engineering & Design Manager

Financial Manager

IS ManagerSupplies

Manager

Marketing Manager

Operations Manager

Sharedknowledge

Reference: Markus, M.L., Majchrzak, A., and Gasser, L. (2002) "A Design Theory For Systems That Support Emergent Knowledge Processes," MIS Quarterly (26:3), 179-212.

Dr. Susan Gasson, 2006

Two Dimensions of Knowledge Management in The Joint Construction of Group Knowledge

Knowledge Emergence: shared understanding of knowledge

required for decision or action

Knowledge Situatedness:

extent to which decision or action is based on local

knowledge

CONTEXT-SPECIFIC

PREDICTABLE (Articulable)

GENERALIZABLE

EMERGENT(Inarticulable)

Adapted from: Gasson & Shelfer (forthcoming), ‘IT-Based Knowledge Management To Support Organizational Learning’, Information Technology & People

Transferable knowledge

Requires human apprenticeship

Hidden knowledge

Requires learning

from mistakes

Codifiable knowledge

Routine and

programmable decision-making

Discoverable knowledge

Requires

inferences, derived from historical data

Dr. Susan Gasson, 2006

A Shift In KM Perspectives

Managing Knowledge-As-Thing

• Knowledge is individual, explicit, and articulable

• Created through reduction and reification of explicit, articulable “best practice” – proceduralization

• Results in automation – the codification of work to replace human decisionmakers

• IT controls knowledge “transfer” between work-contexts and people.

Managing Knowledge-As-Process

• Knowledge is embedded in group practice & culture (tacit)

• Created through shared work practices, common language, demonstrations of expertise – process coordination

• Results in automaticity – the skillful practice of collective work, coordinated through information resources

• IT supports information coordination in collaborative, emergent knowledge processes.

Dr. Susan Gasson, 2006

Implications

• Need to manage dynamic processes not static procedures

• Support emergent knowledge processes with adaptive information resources

• Design IT systems differently:– Focus on information resources, not rules– Design for continual adaptation– Place control of system configuration in hands

of knowledge workers and business managers, not IT analysts.