Conceptualizing Knowledge Sharing and IT

This section draws on the literature review and specifically Schultze and Boland’s (2000b) work on narrative to develop a conceptual framework (Figure 5.1) pertaining to the ways in which knowledge is shared through ITs such as groupware and the intranet (Zack, 1999a). This comprises ongoing acting (practice) and accounting (textual narratives) processes.

Figure 5.1 Acting and Accounting Processes

Schultze and Boland’s (2000b) study of US Company found that new work arrangements arose due to the reliance on the use of IT to work across spatial, temporal, and functional boundaries. They described how these new work practices required employees to perform dual ‘acting’ and ‘accounting’ processes. Acting involved employees undertaking their work (in their case IT consultancy activities which involved fixing machines and developing new applications) and accounting processes required them to record a narrative of their practice by making explicit their activities and views on the various shared discussion forums and lessons learned databases that cut across the organization’s spatial, temporal, and functional boundaries. Based on this insight, acting and accounting can be conceived as comprising of three ongoing processes, sense making, sense giving, and sense reading.

Sense making is akin to what Schultze and Boland (2000b) refer to as an ‘out of body’ experience, where staff are required to consciously reflexively monitor and make sense of their own on-going activities (what they have done, how they achieved this in specific contexts, what their views are, etc.). They do this so they can account for their ongoing activity in a textual form and engage in sense giving.

Sense giving involves the provision of a textual account to others about their activity on a shared software application. This could be either an integrative application such as a ‘repository’ or an interactive application such as a shared discussion forum, a lessons learned database or a blog technology. Employees are required to account for their activities on such a technology in a way that is comprehensible to members of their own or other professional domains.

Sense reading refers to the process whereby a person makes sense of the accounts that other staff have made and then utilizes them in their ongoing activities. Sense reading depends on their familiarity with the knowledge domain, practice and political context of the sense giver, not to mention the sense giver’s ability to account for their activity in a clear textual form. Importantly, we should not view this as being linear because when people make sense of accounts they are reading they do this by drawing on memories of other accounts they have read, discussions they have had, activities they have performed individually or while working with or observing others (Orr, 1996). Consequently, accounting processes are deeply rooted in practice and inherently collaborative and social as, even when posting accounts and reading accounts while working on their own, they do so by drawing on previous encounters. This is important as Figure 5.1 does not do sufficient justice to the social nature of acting and accounting processes. The following section draws on a case study; first, to illustrate the applicability of the acting and accounting framework and, second, to furnish the framework further by considering it in relation to knowledge domains and political dimensions.