C H A PT E R 4
Conceptualizing Knowledge
Emergence
4.1
GATEKEEPERS,INFORMATION, STARS,AND BOUNDARY SPANNERS
The
seminal work was that of Thomas J. Allen of MIT [Allen and Cohen, 1969,
Allen,T.,1977] who conducted a number of studies relating to information flow
in industrial and corporate R&D laboratories.Allen’s most ingenious
contribution to the field was to seize upon the phenomenon that in many cases
in the context of military R&D and procurement, the same contract is awarded
to two different organizations to achieve the same end, typically in the case
of a critical component of a larger system. Duplicative development contracts
may, in fact, be very worthwhile insurance against the failure of a key
component of a system. This duplication provided a wonderfully robustcontext in
which to examine information flows and what distinguished the information flows
in the more successful projects from the less successful.
Allen
coined the term ‘Gatekeeper’ to describe the information flow stars that he
discovered,the heavily connected nodes in the information flow pattern. The
reason that he chose that term was that much of the development and project
work that he investigated was classified military work, where there seemed to
be something of a paradox, how was a team to be successful if it didn’t
effectively connect with the world of information outside the organization? But
how did it do that in a classified and communication restricted
environment?What he discovered was that the information stars, the sociometric
stars, were the answer to that paradox; they were the information channels
through which external information reached the project team.That role was so
crucial in the contexts that Allen typically investigated what he termed his sociometric
stars “Gatekeepers.” They oversaw and guarded the gates through which external
information reached the projects. Indeed, one might say that they were not just
the gatekeepers, they themselves were the gates.
4.2 RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY
AND KNOWLEDGE
The ‘Gatekeepers,
Information Stars & Boundary Spanner’ tradition is very consistent with a
substantial body of work studying research productivity. Koenig,M. [1992a], for
example, in the context of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, studied the relationship
between research productivity and the information environment in which that
research was conducted. The productivity measure was, at base, simply the
number of approved new drugs (new drug applications or NDAs) per millions of
dollars of R&D budget. This measure, however, was refined by weighting the
NDAs in regard to: 1) whether or not the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
judged the drug to be an “important therapeutic advance,” 2) the chemical
novelty of the drug, and 3) the filing company’s patent position in regard to
the drug, an indicator of where the bulk of the research was done. The study is
compelling because of the high face validity of the measure of success, the
successful introduction of new pharmaceutical agents, since that is what pharmaceutical
companies are about after all, and because of the statistical robustness of the
results, a consequence of the fact that the more successful companies were
found to be not just twenty or thirty percent more productive than the not so
successful companies, they were two or three hundred percent more productive.
The more productive
companies were characterized by:
·
A relatively egalitarian
managerial structure with unobtrusive status indicators in the R&D
environment,
·
Less concern with
protecting proprietary information,
·
Greater openness to
outside information, greater use of their libraries and information centers,
specifically, greater attendance by employees at professional meetings,
·
Greater information systems
development effort,
·
Greater end-user use of
information systems and more encouragement of browsing and serendipity.
Increased time spent browsing and keeping abreast,
4.3 LACK OF RECOGNITION
OFTHESE FINDINGS IN THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY
As
Allen pointed out in his study, there is a surprising lack of recognition of
these findings about the importance of information stars in the business
community. This is, in fact, a subset of an even larger problem - the lack of
recognition of or even obtuseness to the importance of information and
information related managerial actions in the business community. For example,
one major study that reviewed a large corpus of work on R&D innovation,
[Goldhar et al., 1976], concluded that there are six characteristics of
environments that are conducive to technological innovations. The three most
important characteristics are all related to the information environment and
information flow – specifically: 1) easy access to information by individuals;
2) free flow of information both into and out of the organizations; 3) rewards
for sharing, seeking, and using “new” externally developed information sources.
Note the ‘flow in and out’ and the ‘sharing, seeking, and using’. Number six is
also information environment related, 6) the encouragement of mobility and
interpersonal contacts. Yet in a remarkable oversight, the studies’ authors
never remarked on the dramatic win, place, and show finish of information and
knowledge factors.
4.4 COMMUNITY-BASEDMODELS
The
Information Systems literature points to an abundance ofKMstrategies in the
category of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Such systems provide the
infrastructure for enabling the interactions needed for a group’s knowledge
synergies and interactive activities [Maier, R., 2002] and may include bulletin
boards, electronic meeting/conferencing, or online chat. In this model, the
notion of space [Ruhleder, K., 2002], physical or otherwise, is important
primarily because the meeting place or system provides an environment that
allows for interactions to unfold, at the convenience of individual
participants, often asynchronously. Further, such CMC interactions allow for
the creation of persistent records [Robins, J., 2002] of the interactions. Chat
and other kind of social media transcriptions can be preserved too as another
example. To the extent that discourse occurs through such interactions, the
dialectics can be archived for future reference and subsequent “reuse.”
However, asHislop, D. [2002] points out, while technology may provide the
tools for interaction and communication, the application of technology alone
may not be a sufficient condition for sustaining the creation and sharing of
knowledge.
4.5 REPOSITORY MODEL
The
knowledge management repository, a space to store and retrieve knowledge
objects has long been a standard in KMprograms. It is a model that emphasizes
the creation of quality knowledge content in online repositories with re-use as
a goal. Markus, M. [2001] argues that the purpose and content of knowledge
records in repositories often differ depending on who needs the documentation:
the content producer, similar others, or dissimilar others. She emphasizes that
a great deal of effort is required to produce quality content, and, as such,
part of the burden of documenting and packaging knowledge objects can be
transferred to intermediaries, saving time and energy of the organization’s
staff. In addition, adding context is also another aspect of making content
more usable. Markus proposes the roles of human intermediaries in what she
terms as “repurposing” of repositories to make them more appropriate for use by
others. Examples of activities that could be performed include abstracting,
indexing, authoring, and sanitizing or scrubbing content. Because of the costs
involved in repackaging and making repository knowledge content more usable to
the knowledge seeker,Markus looks to an expanded role for technological support
of core competencies of librarians, archivists, data curators, and other
information professionals.
4.6 ACTIVITY-BASEDMODELS
While
there has been significant work done in terms of Information Systems support
for the coordination of work [Winograd,T., 1988], the next logical progression
would be to link knowledge production and capture with work processes. For
example, Blackler, F. [1995] considers knowledge in organizations as socially
distributed collective activity systems, and emphasizes the significance of
incoherence and dilemma as the key issues in social systems. Similarly,
Engeström, Y. [1999] research, using activity systems as cycles of expansive
learning in work practices, also points to the importance of activities
as providing the necessary context for grounding organizational knowledge.
Based on such a historical-cultural perspective of activity, Hasan, H. [2003]
proposed rudiments of a KM system influenced by activity-based models that
would link work activities with people and content.
