Group items tagged

This ethnographic study investigates how a project group deals with the contradiction between distributed knowledge in boundary-spanning collaborative processes and the expectation that software systems will provide unified, codified knowledge. Group and individual activities were observed over a period of 18 months, to examine the ways knowledge was presented, recognized, shared, or otherwise managed during joint design of business process and IT systems change. The study explores how knowledge and expertise were translated across organizational boundaries, and identifies four stages in the development of group understanding of how to manage sensemaking and expertise across knowledge boundaries: focus on defining shared goals; acknowledging and sharing tacit knowledge about organizational practice; identifying external influences; and explicit knowledge generation.

The visible dimension of an organisation consists of its structure, stories, spaces and its core values. These are the building blocks of the cultural aspect of any organisation. The authors quote an example of how stories can form and affect the culture and way people think about their work within the company. At Lotus there was a well circulated story of how an employee logged into her notes to work from the hospital bed. This highlighted her motivation to work and set an amazing example for the rest of the organisation to follow. Stories can effectively communicate what actions are in bounds or out of bounds and sets the tempo for the organisations working culture. The authors club all the above mentioned “artefacts” into a single object and look at these artefacts as the visible part of an organisation’s culture.