Contributing Your Wisdom or Showing Your Cards: A Quantitative Inquiry of Knowledge Sharing Behavior

In recent years, attempts to capture and leverage a firm’s knowledge resources have become a primary focus in the pursuit of competitive advantage. Business leaders increasingly look to their firms’ bases of knowledge as their most critical strategic resource. This trend has led to the adoption of knowledge management initiatives aimed at leveraging the knowledge of individuals to advance the economic interests of an organization. Within such an effort, knowledge sharing behavior is an essential precondition for success. This study explores the determinants of knowledge sharing by applying Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior to the context of knowledge management. The model provides support for an emphasis on relationship issues in the development of knowledge management programs. In addition, the model addresses both formal and informal features of organizational contexts that can affect knowledge sharing behavior. The model contributes to the study of knowledge management by addressing elements of a firm’s formal policies that may promote or inadvertently discourage knowledge sharing and by providing a robust framework for the analysis of knowledge sharing

Collective Hermeneutics in a Systems Development Process

The inherent complexity of information systems development presents significant impediments to the achievement of shared meaning among the members of a development team. In addition to the technical requirements of systems development, its intensely social nature challenges project teams to unite around a collective understanding of the processes and objectives that they pursue. How then do software development teams resolve questions of shared meaning in the development process? In this study, we build upon observations of a large platform development team to identify the ways in which team members converge around shared meanings through a repertoire of interpretive techniques. Specifically, we develop a model of interpretive team interaction that is based on the concept of a collective hermeneutic process. The collective hermeneutic model extends the hermeneutic tradition in IS research by addressing the ways in which an interpretation takes shape not simply within the mind of an individual but also through collaboration with others. Finally, we discuss implications of this theoretical perspective for the design of systems development environments and the prospect for additional research on the interpretive processes of development teams

Share and Share Alike: The Social and Technological Influences on Knowledge Sharing Behavior

In recent years, attempts to capture and leverage a firm\u27s knowledge resources have become a primary focus in the pursuit of competitive advantage. Business leaders have increasingly looked to their firms\u27 bases of knowledge - on topics such as customers, suppliers, markets, and business practices-as their most critical strategic resource. This trend has led to the widespread adoption of knowledge management initiatives aimed at capturing and leveraging the knowledge of social actors within an organization to advance the economic interests of the firm. Within such an effort, the behavior of knowledge sharing by individual business professionals stands as a necessary first condition for programmatic success. This essay explores the determinants of knowledge sharing by applying Ajzen\u27s Theory of Planned Behavior to the context of knowledge management. The implications of the model provide support for an emphasis on organizational culture and relationship issues in the development and initiation of a knowledge management program. The model presented incorporates both formal and informal features of organizational contexts that can promote or discourage knowledge sharing behavior. The critical nature of social factors, reflected in the organizational culture of a firm, is strongly supported by the model. In addition, the analysis will illustrate the degree to which technological resources can influence the expected knowledge sharing behavior of business professionals

Designing Collaborative Infrastructures to Support Distributed Work

A growing proportion of contemporary organizational work takes place in the context of distributed collaborative environments which involve the interaction of multiple organizations with distinct areas of expertise, technologies, and work practices. In this research-in-progress, we develop a three-part model of the facets of collaborative infrastructure that support such distributed collaborative environments. We argue that collaborative infrastructures inherently reflect the interplay of practices, artifacts, and discourse. Specifically, our model asserts that the development of shared practices and artifacts by organizations engaged in collaboration is mediated by the emergence of common discourses between the parties. The preliminary theorizing developed in this paper is based on multiple case study analyses of collaborative projects in the areas of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) and software development and implementation. Our initial research suggests key areas of consideration by collaboration leaders in the development of collaborative infrastructures for distributed work

Spinning the Web of Care: Logics of IT in the Healthcare Marketplace

In this study, we analyze the adoption of IT resources within the U.S. healthcare system from the perspective of institutional logics. We focus on the impact of adoption of EHR and other health IT on the interactions between diverse stakeholders and the values and objectives driving EHR adoption. Our findings reveal a wider range of observable institutional logics than discussed in previous research within healthcare. We see evidence of both conflicting and complementary logics in the move to an IT-intensive healthcare system. Our study calls attention to institutional logics that may unite healthcare stakeholders around a common reform vision. We also observe conflicting logics whose relative prevalence is likely to be impacted with growing EHR adoption. This research also highlights the value of framing institutional logics in a more systems-oriented fashion than reflected in previous research

Agility in the balance: Control, autonomy, and ambidexterity in agile software development

Agile methodologies for information systems development (ISD) are still drawing the attention of the research community. These methodologies promise to increase an ISD team’s adaptiveness in such a way that ISD teams are able to respond and react to changing user requirements.Existing studies on team autonomy in agile ISD, however, implythat these projects potentially can benefit from different elements of control.Our objective is to improve the understanding of how to enact control throughagilepractices, and how these practices influenceteam autonomy and task performance in successful agile ISD projectsin terms of project performance and project quality. This is achieved by developing a preliminary research model that is based on a solid theoretical foundation. As a theoretical framework, we employ ISD ambidexterityand extend it with context-specific insights from controltheory. In consequence, we suggest several propositions for future testing

Minding the Boundary: Electronic Health Records and the Transformation of U.S. Healthcare Practice

The U.S. healthcare system is riding a wave of clinical health IT investment, centered on electronic health records (EHR) systems adoption. Supported by governmental incentives, this build-out has positioned the healthcare system for a period of transformation as EHR functionality becomes ingrained in the work routines of healthcare providers and other system participants. We report on a field study of healthcare participants to explore the influence of EHR adoption on the boundaries and practices of the field. Our grounded theory analysis reveals the interplay between the field practices of individual communities and the boundary spanning practices that unite them. Through the adoption of a practice perspective, we assess the varied boundary object aspects of EHR systems and their influence on boundary spanning and field practices alike. We conclude with a consideration of the positive and potentially negative consequences of widespread EHR use for delivery of healthcare services