Richard J. Boland

Knowledge management technology and the reproduction of knowledge work practices

Abstract Organizations seeking ways to manage their knowledge assets are increasingly turning to information technology for solutions. As knowledge management systems are being developed and implemented, it behooves both practitioners and researchers to learn from the successes and failures of more established types of information systems including MIS and DSS. According to the Standish Group, the implementation success rate for these systems runs at around 30%. Many argue that these low success rates are, in part, attributable to technologists’ lack of understanding of the situated work practices of the systems’ user communities. This has lead to increasing calls for research on work practice in the field of Information Systems. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what is meant by work practice. Furthermore, the consideration of work practice outside of its circuit of reproduction can be misleading. By circuits of reproduction we mean the reciprocal relationships through which practice creates and recreates the objectified social structures and conditions in which it occurs. In this paper, we adopt Bourdieus Theory of Practice to illuminate work practices and their circuits of reproduction. Relying on data that were collected during an eight-month ethnography of knowledge work practices in a US-based, Fortune 500 manufacturing firm, we focus on the situated “gatekeeping” practices of a group of competitive intelligence analysts and explore how their situated practices were at odds with the generalized “gatekeeping” practices embedded in a knowledge management technology whose implementation they themselves were advocating. We argue that their inability to see this incongruence until very late in the pilot implementation is associated with an understanding of their work practices in isolation, i.e. outside of their circuits of reproduction.

Accounting and the interpretive act

The structuration theory of Anthony Giddens has been employed by Macintosh & Scapens (Accounting, Organizations and Society, 1990, pp. 455–477) to argue that management accounting systems are the interpretive schemes, facilities and norms used by managements to make plans, take actions and control others in organizations. A study of managers reading management accounting reports challenges that image, and shows managers to be more potent and inventive creators of meaning than Macintosh and Scapens would suggest. As readers of management accounting reports, managers draw from a wide range of interpretive schemes, facilities and norms in making their interpretations. Management accounting systems may mediate this interpretive process, but they can do so in surprising and unexpected ways.

Distributed Innovation in Classes of Networks

Rapid developments in digital technologies have brought to force new challenges in innovation. In this paper, we propose a taxonomic framework of innovation networks in order to identify new challenges. Innovation networks form socio-technical systems that exist in a distributed cognitive space. The generative processes in these innovation networks involve both cognitive and social translations. At the same time, the rapid developments of digital technologies have reduced communication costs and allow integration of previously unconnected activities and artifacts due to digital convergence. These two forces of digitization - reduction in communication cost and digital convergence - stretch the innovation networks in two dimensions. On one hand, we see an increasing distribution of control and coordination among actors participating in innovation networks. On the other hand, we also see an increasing heterogeneity in knowledge resources that are mobilized during an innovation. These two dimensions allow us to conceptualize four types of innovation networks that result from pervasive use of digital technologies: singular innovation, open source innovation, internal markets of innovation, and doubly distributed innovation networks. We discuss the implications of our conceptual framework for the evolution of information infrastructures, future innovation research based on network analyses, and the new interlacing of ontology and epistemology of innovations.

From Work to Activity: Technology and the Narrative of Progress

Information technology transforms work in all its variety into uniform inscriptions that are combinable across time and space. Its digitized codings and classifications are immutable mobiles which claim to represent the true form of work to management and workers alike. Activity based costing is an accounting technology that produces such immutable mobiles. It promises to capture the essence of work and transport it unchanged from the factory floor to the manager’s suite. We use this accounting technology as an exemplar to trace the rhetoric of how new worlds and new logics of work are created with the inspiration of information technology. We do so by analyzing a central story with which activity based costing justifies itself and makes its truth claims, and by identifying the kind of world, organization and work it creates. By expanding and extending the plot of the story told by the principal proponents of activity based costing, we expose some contradictions of this powerful system of representation and locate it within a larger narrative that promises progress through information technology.

Method and metaphor in organizational analysis

Abstract The design of an information system begins with the analysis of an organization in order to identify problems and requirements for corrective action. We report on an empirical exploration of language use by system analysts in an organizational analysis exercise that reveals how the schemas used in the analysis shaped the formulation of problems and the choice of action. Organic and mechanistic metaphors were used to prime the two sets of schemas used by the subjects. The study supports structurational and enactment theories of organization that propose organizational strategies and structures that emerge from situated action and language practice. The idea that language use shapes information system design challenges the hope for a method of justifying our analyses based on an objective and neutral language. The study also shows how different schemas frame an organizational contradiction in different ways and propose different interventions to resolve it.

Digital product innovation within four classes of innovation networks

The increased digitization of organizational processes and products poses new challenges for understanding product innovation. It also opens new horizons for information systems research. We analyse how ongoing pervasive digitization of product innovation reshapes knowledge creation and sharing in innovation networks. We argue that advances in digital technologies (1) increase innovation network connectivity by reducing communication costs and increasing its reach and scope and (2) increase the speed and scope of digital convergence, which increases network knowledge heterogeneity and need for integration. These developments, in turn, stretch existing innovation networks by redistributing control and increasing the demand for knowledge coordination across time and space presenting novel challenges for knowledge creation, assimilation and integration. Based on this foundation, we distinguish four types of emerging innovation networks supported by digitalization: (1) project innovation networks; (2) clan innovation networks; (3) federated innovation networks; and (4) anarchic innovation networks. Each network involves different cognitive and social translations – or ways of identifying, sharing and assimilating knowledge. We describe the role of five novel properties of digital infrastructures in supporting each type of innovation network: representational flexibility, semantic coherence, temporal and spatial traceability, knowledge brokering and linguistic calibration. We identify several implications for future innovation research. In particular, we focus on the emergence of anarchic network forms that follow full‐fledged digital convergence founded on richer innovation ontologies and epistemologies calling to critically re‐examine the nature and impact of modularization for innovation.

The Limits of Language in Doing Systems Work

Doing systems work brings us to the limits of language as few human activities do. It uniquely joins the empathetic reading of human motivations, desires, and needs with a creative envisioning of new socio-technical arrangements in hopes of transforming the world. It is at once humble and audacious, finely detailed and grandly epic. Fundamental notions of goodness, truth, and beauty are relied upon in ways that forever challenge our ability to justify.