This penultimate section draws upon the analysis presented in the previous sections to establish guidelines for developers to consider; first, when IT is used to support work between communities and, second, for work within communities. The term ‘developers’ is a deliberately broad category in order to refer to all those involved in the creation, introduction, and review of shared forums.
First and foremost, developers need to establish education programs to assist in countering the difficulties that have reportedly arisen in relation to acting, accounting, and sense-making processes. These programs should aim to provide staff with an insight into the conventions and rationales of members of other professional domains and, furthermore, a detailed understanding of their work practices. To achieve this, the program should first consist of experts from different professional backgrounds making presentations that outline the typical tasks they perform and the logic that they use to undertake their work. They should also present examples of the different types of information and expertise that they would like members of other functions to contribute.
Second, to solidify their sense making, giving, and reading processes, participants should undertake exercises on the knowledge management application with program participants from different professional domains, so as to provide them with feedback about how they could improve their accounting processes. Third, developers should rebuff access to organization-wide shared databases until they are satisfied that each employee’s accounting and sense-making processes have reached an adequate level of competence. Further, developers need to develop one-off programs when there are any significant changes in the ways that specific professional domains undertake their work, and especially if any large-scale restructurings take place. Education programs of this sort will require levels of ongoing investment and senior management commitment that is typically not associated with groupware implementations (Grudin, 1990), which may be one of the most difficult issues to address.
A final guideline for developers to consider is the need for mentors to be assigned to less experienced staff. Mentors should be those staff experienced in working with employees in the varying professional domains. First, mentors should review the contributions made by less experienced colleagues and advise them how they could better meet the needs of members of other professions. Second, mentors should assist their charges in making sense of the representations recorded by members of other professions. Finally, mentors should highlight circumstances where in-depth face-to-face interactions may be more beneficial than relying on representations recorded on the IT.
With regard to E2.0 applications such as wikis and blogs, I would suggest the above guidelines would also be relevant. However, in addition I suggest one further normative guideline relating to education. Orlikowski and Gash (1994) developed the concept of technological frames to highlight how it is that people tend to interpret a new technology through their existing understandings and experiences of technology. For example, one of the challenges for groupware has been for users to shift from viewing groupware as an individual productivity tool to an application that was put in place to support collaboration (Orlikowski, 1993). With regard to E2.0, while proponents argue that as users are already familiar with wikis, blogs, and instant messaging, due to their prior personal and recreational use of the Internet, this may not necessarily be advantageous. Making sense of how to use E2.0 within a specific organizational context through a Web 2.0 technological frame may be problematical (Warr, 2008). For example, how will prior experiences of writing an Internet blog about a particular interest or hobby help in their understandings of posting to a work related audience? Would the same style of writing be relevant and if not what would be? What content should they post? How much practice will those reading their post share with them? Will the requirements and conditions for sense making, giving, and reading be substantially different to those relevant to a Web 2.0 technological frame? Secondly, the vast majority of people merely read and review the posts of others on wikis and blogs rather than contribute to them. Thus, an E2.0 technological frame will require a change in expectations if people are also to contribute. I suggest that understanding if and how technological frames shift following the introduction of E2.0 will be vital to shaping the extent and nature of sense making, sense giving, and sense reading activities. Understanding the changes to technological frames, I would suggest, is likely to be an important feature of an E2.0 specific education program.
In relation to countering the difficulties arising from political and normative issues, due to the complexity that surrounds how the political and normative context is continually produced and reproduced, generating guidelines in the relatively prescriptive form described so far in this subsection is more difficult. However, there are several issues relating to the symbolism that senior managers exhibit in their on-going use of shared discussion forums that organizations should bear in mind. Senior managers need to recognize that when people account for their activities on shared forums they endeavor to do so in a way that they deem to be politically and normatively acceptable to senior managers. They do this by continually monitoring the use that senior managers have made of the discussion forums. This will include the consistency of the tone and nature of views recorded, how the visibility that the technology provides has been harnessed to monitor and control their subordinates’ practice, which discussion forums they have participated in or utilized, and their conduct and directives outside the discussion forums. It is important for senior managers to recognize that when the symbolism they exhibit leads to participation in discussion forums being of a highly political nature many staff will exclude themselves from participating in those forums that they consider to be normatively optional. Furthermore, it is also worth noting that sense-making processes are highly dependent on the history of previous organizational restructurings in specific contexts, which are often associated with increased workloads and new forms of control, rather than valuing professional autonomy. Finally, the above political issues need to be considered carefully when modifying the career or financial reward structure to emphasize reciprocity, as has been suggested in several previous studies (Zack, 1999a; Pan and Scarbrough, 1999), to analyze how this is likely to affect different forms of careerist and non-careerist activity.
Such implications are also relevant to E2.0 technologies. One could imagine in Compound UK, for example, that the tags chosen by staff will reflect those contributions that are provided by senior managers in an organization rather than necessarily tagging the most read or best contributions to a blog or a wiki. Further, one would expect communications via an instant messenger to be directed at those senior in the organization just as the introduction of email led to senior managers receiving large numbers of messages from ambitious staff who wanted to be ‘seen’ by their superiors. Further, in many organizations, the motivations for contributing to wikis and blogs would also be to politicize rather than merely to post on a blog contributions that were necessarily conceived of as being useful to others. In Kappa, such uses of E2.0 may not have arisen. Thus, I consider that the shape and nature of sense making, giving, and reading processes relating to E2.0 will be inextricably interlinked with the organization’s political and normative context.