The Social Organization

LIS 880 Knowledge Management

Session 5

Session 5 Readings Brown S.B., Duguid P. (2000). Home Alone. In The

Social Life of Information (63-89). Boston, MA:Harvard Business School Press.

Brown S.B., Duguid P. (2000). Practice Makes Process.In The Social Life of Information (91-115). Boston,

MA:Harvard Business School Press.

Nonaka, I. (1998). The Knowledge Creating Company. In Drucker P.F. (ed.) Harvard Business Review onKnowledge Management (pp. 21-45). Boston, MA:Harvard Business School Press.

Physical Space & Knowledge Management

• People who work together need to be together

• Isolation of employees and groups can bring learning problems

• How much collaboration has email cost us?

• Steve Jobs and the Pixar Offices

“If a building doesn’t encourage [collaboration], you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” ~Steve Jobs[The atrium houses a reception, employee mailboxes, cafe, foosball, fitness center, two 40-seat viewing rooms, and a large theater – and was planned by Jobs to house the campus’ only restrooms. The idea was that people who naturally isolate themselves would be forced to have great conversations, even if that took place while washing their hands.]

Human Response to Change

• Going paperless for Patient Education at CRH

• Changes that do not enhance or mesh with current workflows will be adapted

• Humans have an uncanny way of working around the system (i.e. “workarounds”)

Social Informatics

• Where technology and humans intersect• We often forget humans in developing

technological solutions• Examples include Electronic Health

Records, Sharepoint installations that make information harder to share than before, new platforms to replace manual processes that were already efficient

• Why?

Can This Help?

Process Improvement

• Cannot be applied everywhere• Often ignores social aspects of a

process• Consider Barcode Medication

Administration (BCMA) as an example– Patient Sleeping, Nursing or Combative– Barcode missing or damaged–Wristband from another hospital or

damaged

Mental Models

• Representation in the mind or how real or physical aspects of the world work

• Donald Norman provides the example of the calculator in Things That Make Us Smart

• Mental Models are often flawed• Observation can correct –

Ethnographies, Interviews, Shadowing etc.

How Groups Solve Problems Beyond the Organization

• Collaboration – through sharing experiences in informal environments

• Narration – storytelling offers unique qualities to adjust mental models and enable remembering

• Improvisation – Bending the rules or “thinking outside the box”

• This is the beginning of our introduction to the tools for KM

Moving Along

• This week– Knowledge Transfer in Organizations– Social Aspects of Knowledge Transfer– Technology & Models do not always

solve real problems or represent them accurately

• Next week = The Learning Organization

• Following Week = We come back to Knowledge Exchange and Transfer

Questions?