Knowledge Management:

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European Management Journal Vol. 19, No. 6, pp. 599–608, 2001  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved 0263-2373/01 $20.00 S0263-2373(01)00085-8

Knowledge Management: The Benefits and Limitations of Computer Systems GEOFF WALSHAM, Judge Institute of Management Studies, University of Cambridge Much organisational effort has been put into knowledge management initiatives in recent years, and information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been central to many of these initiatives. However, organisations have found that levering knowledge through ICTs is often hard to achieve. This paper addresses the question of why this is the case, and what we can learn of value to the future practice of knowledge management. The analysis in the paper is based on a human-centred view of knowledge, emphasising the deep tacit knowledge which underpins human thought and action, and the complex sense-reading and sensegiving processes which human beings carry out in communicating with each other and ‘sharing’ knowledge. The paper concludes that computerbased systems can be of benefit in knowledgebased activities, but only if we are careful in using such systems to support the development and communication of human meaning.  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Knowledge management, Information and communication technologies, Tacit knowledge, Meaning, Communication, Knowledge-sharing

Introduction Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become an essential component of contemporary society, not least through the growth of the Internet. However, many issues concerned with the human aspects of the use of computer-based systems remain problematic despite technological advances. An enhanced ability to collect and process data, or to communicate electronically across time and space,

does not necessarily lead to improved human communication and action (Walsham, 2001). This article explores the issue of the benefits and limitations of computer systems in supporting human activity, with a specific focus on the topic of knowledge management. Knowledge has been a fashionable subject in recent years, with significant attention focussed on areas such as the key role of knowledge workers, the need to generate and share knowledge, and the creation of knowledge-intensive organisations and societies. ICTs offer many potential opportunities in these domains. For example, the Web provides a wider set of data sources than any previous technology, with a massive range of information available for easy access. Electronic communication across time and space is faster and can carry much higher bandwidth than in previous eras. So, in principle, ICTs seem to offer human beings, and the organisations for which they work, much faster, cheaper and broader sources of data and means of communication to enable them to generate and share knowledge. It is not surprising that many organisations have invested significant amounts of time and money in knowledge management initiatives over the last few years. However, the picture which is emerging is not a clear cut one in terms of the success of these initiatives. For example, McDermott (1999) noted that most companies soon find that levering knowledge through the use of ICTs is hard to achieve. Why is this the case? And what can we learn about the benefits and limitations of computer-based systems in this area which will be of value to improved future practice? The purpose of this article is to try to provide some answers to these questions, drawing on the significant amount of research and experience reported in 599

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the academic and practitioner literatures. So, this is a stock-taking exercise to some extent, but I hope that the reader will find some interesting new insights from my attempt here at synthesis.

Knowledge and Knowledge-Sharing I want to start with an obvious question, namely ‘what is knowledge?’. Now this question has concerned philosophers for thousands of years, and it is unlikely that I can provide a new or definitive answer here. However, some reflections on the question are crucial in my view, not least in attempting to refute naı¨ve and simplistic views of knowledge, some of which can be found alive and well in elements of the management literature. For example, I wish to argue against the simple view of knowledge as a commodity, or a quantifiable tradeable asset. I wish to take a more human-centred view of knowledge, with a strong focus on what is in people’s minds, how they represent this to others, and how others interpret these representations. A key figure in the literature on knowledge management in the 1990s was Ikujiro Nonaka (Nonaka, 1994). He popularised the distinction between ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’ knowledge, and developed the wellknown spiral of organisational knowledge creation drawing on conversions between these knowledge types. Nonaka drew heavily on the work of the philosopher Michael Polanyi in creating his knowledge management models, and whilst he himself seemed to have a good grasp of Polanyi’s thinking, Nonaka’s work is sometimes used to justify approaches which are not in the spirit of the original ideas. For example, Davenport et al. (1998) report some interesting empirical work on knowledge management projects, but perpetuate the view of knowledge as an object which can be transferred by highlighting the following: To transfer tacit knowledge from individuals into a repository, organizations usually use some sort of communitybased electronic discussion. (p. 45)

In order to see why this is not in keeping with Polanyi’s ideas, and how the Chinese whispers through Nonaka and Davenport have distorted the original message, let us go back to what Polanyi himself had to say about the nature of knowledge and knowledge-sharing. In discussing the way in which human beings perceive the world, Polanyi (1966) introduced the notion of tacit power as the way in which we actively shape or integrate new experience to discover and believe new knowledge: However, I am looking at (perception of the world as a whole) … the outcome of an active shaping of experience 600 EMJ: European Management Journal

performed in the pursuit of knowledge. This shaping or integrating I hold to be the great and indisputable tacit power by which all knowledge is discovered and, once discovered, is held to be true. (p. 6)

This tacit power produces the deep tacit knowledge which we have of the world in which we live, and this power is different for each individual due to our different initial dispositions and experiences. In commenting in a later work (Polanyi, 1969) on the nature of ‘explicit knowledge’, such as the contents of books for example or even the meaning of a single word, Polanyi is clear that there is no objective explicit knowledge independent of the individual’s tacit knowing: The ideal of a strictly explicit knowledge is indeed selfcontradictory; deprived of their tacit coefficients, all spoken words, all formulae, all maps and graphs, are strictly meaningless. An exact mathematical theory means nothing unless we recognise an inexact non-mathematical knowledge on which it bears and a person whose judgement upholds this bearing. (p. 195)

What have these philosophical reflections to offer on the practical subject of the use of ICTs for knowledge management? I believe that they are highly relevant. All databases, on-line data sources, or the contents of e-mails are ‘explicit knowledge’, which should not be confused with the much deeper tacit knowledge which has created them in the first place. And will they be meaningful and helpful to others using them? Only if they connect well to the tacit knowledge of the user, and offer something new or interesting to this person. A manager of a multi-national company recently described his company’s intranet to me as ‘a large warehouse that nobody visits’. It seems that the ‘explicit knowledge’ contained on the intranet had not succeeded in connecting to the users’ tacit world. But before we look at why such occurrences are not uncommon, I want to go back to Polanyi one more time to see what he had to say about communication between people, since this is clearly what we are trying to achieve when we design our databases, send our e-mails or create our on-line sources. Firstly, he identified a distinction between attempts at sensegiving and sense-reading, both acts of tacit knowing: Both the way we endow our own utterances with meaning and our attribution of meaning to the utterances of others are acts of tacit knowing. They represent sense-giving and sense-reading within the structure of tacit knowing. (Polanyi, 1969, p. 181)

Polanyi goes on to tell a story about these processes. He asks us to suppose that person A is travelling in a country which he has not visited before. By the end of the first morning, person A is full of new experiences and reports them by letter to a friend, person B. In Polanyi’s view, this involves three ‘integrations’, or the blending of experience through tacit power as defined above. The first is an intelligent understanding of the sights and events (person A: sense-

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reading), the second is the composing of a verbal account of his experience (person A: sense-giving), and the third is the interpretation of this verbal account (person B: sense-reading). Polanyi undertakes some elegant philosophical analysis of this, which I will not dwell on here, but a key point is that this is not a simple process of ‘knowledge transfer’ as depicted by the ‘knowledge as commodity’ literature. The sense-reading of person A is not perfectly depicted in the attempt at sense-giving in the letter, and is certainly not the same as the sense-reading which is then carried out by person B.

introduced into the literature by Lave and Wenger (1991), who argued that learning is a process of participation in communities-of-practice, participation that is at first peripheral, when the person is a newcomer to the community, but increases gradually in engagement and complexity to ‘full participation’. Brown and Duguid (1991) argued that a key task for organisations is thus to detect and support existing or emergent communities. Brown and Duguid (1998) developed this later in terms of ‘organising knowledge’ in communities-of-practice, arguing the need to support formal and informal processes in such communities, using ICTs where appropriate. So, how can this be achieved, and what are key problems which need to be addressed? I will come to these questions in a moment, but firstly, what exactly are communities-of-practice?

The philosopher Polanyi wrote this material in the early days of computer and communication technologies, and he makes no reference to such media. But I am immediately reminded of a customer database in a pharAn attempt at knowledgemaceutical company in which I carried out some research with sharing is only valuable if What is a Community-of-Practice? a colleague (Hayes and Walsham, 2000). The salespeople one’s views differ from that of visited customers such as docAt some level, we all recognise tors to try to sell them products communities-of-practice, since the other parties in the such as drugs. They recorded we are all members of such material on their meetings in a communities. These include, exchange, since one learns sales database, this being made for example, a group of salespeavailable to other reps to aid ople in a particular pharmanothing from total ‘knowledge-sharing’. This is an ceutical company, a computer identical situation in essence to support team, the academic homogeneity of view Polanyi’s story of the traveller staff in a specific university and the letter. The message is department, or the senior manthat the database in the pharmaceutical company did agement team of an organisation. However, we are not contain objective explicit knowledge which could all members of multiple communities, in our workbe shared with colleagues in an unproblematic way. place and social life, and communities can be broken The contents of a specific entry in the database down into smaller subsets, such as the group of salesreflected the tacit sense-making and sense-giving people in a particular region. Lave and Wenger activities of the salesperson who had visited the doc(1991), despite introducing the term, are not partitor, and the sense-reading processes of other colcularly helpful on its precise definition: leagues determined whether these contents were or The concept of community-of-practice is left largely as an were not considered useful. So what? Well, if we recognised the complexity of these processes a little more, we might have less data warehouses which nobody visits. The solution, however, is to not to abandon the use of ICTs for knowledge management because the processes of creating and using ‘knowledge management systems’ are not simply a matter of transferring objective explicit knowledge between different human beings. Rather, the challenge is to design systems and approaches to their use which recognise the tacit basis of all sensereading and sense-giving activities, and try to make these activities more meaningful and valuable to all parties. In the rest of the article, I will discuss ways of trying to go about doing this.

Supporting Communities-of-Practice One approach to knowledge-sharing has been to focus on ‘communities-of-practice’. This concept was

intuitive notion, which serves a purpose here but requires a more rigorous treatment. (p. 42)

Brown and Duguid (1998) suggest a definition related to ‘shared understanding’ as follows: Through practice, a community-of-practice develops a shared understanding of what it does, of how to do it, and how it relates to other communities and their practices — in all, a ‘world view’. (p. 96)

I wish to make two comments on this statement, one positive and the other more critical. Firstly, the statement provides a clear justification as to why communities-of-practice are a sensible focus for knowledge management initiatives. Going back to the earlier material on sense-giving and sense-reading, these processes are surely easier in a community which shares some common language, purpose and ways of acting. For example, it is much easier for a pharmaceutical salesperson to attempt sense-giving and sense-reading with other such professionals, 601

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rather than with a member of the lay public for example. This may seem obvious, but a word of criticism and caution is in order here. Referring back to Polanyi, there is really no such thing as shared norms and values in a total sense. So-called communities are composed of individuals, each with their own different tacit knowledge. A common purpose, such as selling drugs, and common vocabularies, such as specialist jargon, do not imply a shared world-view. Thompson and Walsham (2001) develop this point to argue that the term ‘symbolic community’ might capture the sharing of common symbols better than the original term of community-of-practice. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it has considerable relevance to computer-based support to communitiesof-practice as I will attempt to show in some of the following material.

ICT Support for Communities As an example of computer-based support to communities, Orlikowski (1996) described the use of Lotus Notes technology in a customer support department of a software company, called Zeta, with headquarters in the Midwest of the United States. The department’s responsibility was to provide technical support via a telephone hotline to all users of Zeta’s products. Technical support was a complex activity, since the products involved advanced networking and database technologies that allowed users to build their own applications. Customer calls were rarely resolved with a brief response, but typically involved several hours of research, including searches of reference material, attempts to replicate the problem, and review of program source code. Lotus Notes was acquired in 1992 and an Incident Tracking Support System was developed, containing a log of interactions with clients and approaches to the resolution of their problems. Orlikowski notes that the nature of the support specialists’ work changed, with an increasing emphasis on documenting work process and searching of the established ‘knowledge base’ thus created. This was seen to have a number of advantages: helping an individual specialist to keep track of a particular problem and attempts at its solution; ‘sharing of such knowledge’ with others so that a wider group could contribute to problem-solving; and creating a database of such incidents to aid the solution of similar customer problems in the future. This case study provides an optimistic assessment of the use of groupware technology to support this particular community-of-practice. We found a rather more mixed picture in our work (Thompson and Walsham, 2001) in assessing a whole range of knowledge management initiatives in a company which we called A1 Software, a leading US-based software sup602 EMJ: European Management Journal

plier and consultancy. In this paper, we identified three categories of knowledge management initiative. The first of these involved large top-down datadriven activities such as the creation of knowledge repositories, presentation slides, and reports. Much of the ‘knowledge’ contained within these repositories was felt to be irrelevant to the personal circumstances of the ‘knowledge user’. Such initiatives were generally considered unsuccessful, and can be classified in the ‘knowledge as commodity’ type of approach criticised earlier in this article. The second category of knowledge management initiative in A1 involved approaches to codify ‘raw data’ into more readily useable forms of information. Examples included decision-making tools, templates intended for customisation by individuals, and ‘technology-push’ reports and news. These initiatives were only felt to have been successful where the needs of the user had been successfully anticipated. For example, salespeople and consultants found the technology-push news bulletins to be an essential method of appraising themselves of new technical developments. It is important to note that these bulletins were heavily tailored to the requirements of this limited user group, and would have been relatively indecipherable to users outside this group. In other words, in the language of Polanyi, the sense-giving activity of those writing the technology bulletins had tried to anticipate the sense-reading activity of a particular group of users, with some degree of success. Knowledge management initiatives in the third category were felt by all respondents to be the most useful, and these relied on continual inter-subjective communication between individuals. Such activities included mentor relationships between new and experienced recruits, communities-of-practice indexes showing who was knowledgeable about which topics, special interest groups, email interaction, and other informal personal interaction. The most valued knowledge management initiatives were thus those in which an individual could interact with other individuals in a community-of-practice through various forms of one-to-one or one-to-many interaction. The sense-giving and sense-reading processes are greatly facilitated when one is operating at this personal level, in a community with common symbols such as specialist language and job purpose, in stark contrast to large data warehouses designed for nobody and often used by nobody. So, should this interaction be face-to-face or through electronic means such as e-mail and on-line discussion forums? The answer to this depends greatly on individual circumstances, but it is likely that a mixture of modes will be better than either extreme. Let’s look at this in terms of sense-giving and sensereading activities. Face-to-face interaction has major advantages in terms of both giving and reading meaning since participants have access to a whole

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range of non-verbal clues and can adjust their input to an interaction in a dynamic manner to try to respond to others. On the other hand, face-to-face meetings are expensive in widely-dispersed organisations, and electronic interaction can be very effective if one already has good ‘knowledge’ of the other person. Evidence to support this view of the need for a blend of face-to-face and electronic interaction is offered in a paper by Maznevski and Chudoba (2000) on the work of three ‘virtual’ teams. They concluded that team interaction was composed of a series of ‘communication incidents’, with effective interaction blending regular face-to-face meetings interspersed with less intensive shorter incidents using various electronic media.

Knowledge, Power and Organisational Politics The material to date in this section has assumed that individuals in communities-of-practice want to share their knowledge and expertise with others in the community, and that the issue is how to achieve this is an effective way. However, writers such as Foucault (1977) have noted the inseparability of knowledge and power, in the sense that what we know affects how influential we are, and vice versa our status affects whether what we know is considered important. The implication of this for knowledgesharing is that there may be some good reasons why individuals may not wish to participate, or may modify some aspects of their sense-giving activities, for reasons related to organisational politics. For example, financial reward systems are an aspect of power relations which may play a significant part in stimulating or constraining collaborative behaviour. In a context where individuals see little in the way of financial reward for knowledge-sharing activities, it is not surprising that forms of knowledge-hoarding may take place. One of our Cambridge MBA students carried out some research on knowledge management in a large advertising agency, and he discovered that the ‘creative’ staff, charged with producing new ideas and images for use in client advertising, were extremely reluctant to share their ideas with colleagues at similar levels. The strongly individual-based reward system did not encourage collaborative behaviour. A second reason why individuals may be reluctant to share their views in an ‘open’ way concerns the danger of being seen to be politically incorrect in terms of current organisational thinking, in particular being seen as out-of-step with the views of more senior staff. There is an irony here, since an attempt at knowledge-sharing with others is only valuable if one’s views differ from that of the other parties in the exchange, since one learns nothing from total homogeneity of view. Nevertheless, people are aware of power-knowledge relations as part of organisational life, and take action accordingly. For example,

in our work in the pharmaceutical company referred to earlier, a group known as the medical liaison managers developed a computer-based discussion database to review and contribute to specific medical issues on a regular basis. However, the medical director asked if he could take part in the discussions. Soon after he had access, the use of the database declined. One of the liaison managers commented as follows: The medical liaison database was really well used but has petered out now. This happened soon after our boss, the medical director, asked if he could be included in it because he had heard how successful it was. No one felt that they could comfortably share views in the knowledge that he was reviewing the database.

On this basis, we have argued the need for ‘safe’ enclaves (Hayes and Walsham, 2000), electronic or otherwise, where individuals in a community-ofpractice may share views, knowing that their organisational superiors have no access to their exchanges.

Sharing Knowledge between Communities Support for knowledge-sharing within communitiesof-practice is a valuable focus for contemporary organisations, but there are many circumstances in which knowledge-sharing between communities is also crucial. This applies both within organisations and between different organisations. In addition, in our increasingly globalised world, interaction between communities also takes place across cultural divides. In this section, I will look at some of the issues which arise in these circumstances, but it is worth noting at the outset that knowledge-sharing between communities is likely to be harder than within communities. Sense-giving and sense-reading of the views of others will generally be more difficult due to the lack of shared symbols such as professional language, job purpose, and cultural norms of behaviour.

Intra-Organisational Communities Brown (1998) argued, based on work in Xerox, that organisations should be seen as ‘communities of communities’, and that new technologies such as intranets are well suited to provide support to the development of effective communication, both within and between communities. He discussed the need to design organisations and their technological systems to support this perspective: Any design of organizational architecture and the ways communities are linked to each other should enhance the healthy autonomy of communities, while simultaneously building an interconnectedness through which to disseminate the results of separate communities’ experiments. In 603

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some form or another the stories that support learning-inworking and innovation should be allowed to circulate. The technological potential is available to support this distribution (e-mail, bulletin boards, home pages, etc. are capable of supporting narrative exchange). (p. 232)

The technological potential to support collaboration may be available, but problematic socio-technical issues with respect to intra-community knowledgesharing have already been highlighted. With respect to inter-community communication, the ‘stories that support learning-in-working’ may circulate, but will they be effectively incorporated in the sense-reading activities of their receivers in a different community? The difficulties of coping with the ways of working, methods of describing this, and taken-for-granted assumptions of people in other communities are likely to be exacerbated where electronic media are used, removing the bodily cues and dynamic interpersonal interaction of face-to-face contact. Newell et al. (2000) supported this view of the difficulty of inter-community collaboration in reporting their study of a major organisational initiative to encourage ‘global knowledge-sharing’ in a large European bank, operating across seventy countries, which they called Ebank. They described, in particular, three specific intranet projects which took place under this umbrella, with varying degrees of success. Each of these was developed within a specific community, and Newell and colleagues drew the conclusions that the technological systems tended to reinforce rather than dissolve existing organisational boundaries: … a whole range of intranet projects sprang up almost spontaneously and with little linkage across the projects … the actual impact of developing these independent intranets was to reinforce existing functional and geographical boundaries with what could be described as ‘electronic fences’. (p. 94)

The metaphor of ‘electronic fences’ provides a nice counter to any misplaced idea that freely circulating electronic data, on intranets or anywhere else, are necessarily a way of effectively sharing knowledge across community boundaries. But, I would not wish to argue that electronicallymediated inter-community knowledge-sharing is doomed to failure from the outset; rather that it presents a major challenge that needs to be addressed. How can the challenge be tackled? There are no simple formulae, and each organisation needs to look carefully at its own emergent and existing communities to think of ways of bridging the sensemaking gaps between them. Brown and Duguid (1998) suggest that organisational translators are one approach to this: Organisational translators are individuals who can frame the interests of one community in terms of another community’s perspective. (p. 103) 604 EMJ: European Management Journal

We can provide a story of such a person from the pharmaceutical company referred to earlier. One of the senior medical advisors, who we will call James Black, was enthusiastic about trying to cross community boundaries to provide effective support for the sales reps in terms of medical advice. His approach to this was to form relationships with individual reps by harnessing opportunities to meet them in person, for example at training and induction sessions. He made a particular effort to meet with reps on both a formal and informal basis. In his own words: I make it my business to meet reps on their training courses and at regional meetings. I do this so they feel confident enough to call me if they need me. I also try to go out and meet doctors with reps where possible.

This made the reps more comfortable in contacting Black for assistance, as well as providing Black, and other medical advisors adopting a similar approach, with a deeper appreciation as to what was involved in being a medical sales rep and vice versa. Interestingly, from the perspective of computer-based support for knowledge-sharing of this type, electronic interaction was then stimulated by the face-to-face relationships that had been built. Black explained how, as reps became more familiar with him as a person, he had noticed that they would increasingly send him e-mails, and complete a considerable amount of detail on the sales databases. The actions taken by ‘translators’ such as Black was to open up a forum, both face-to-face and electronic, within which the assumptions and perspectives of experts from different functions could be more effectively exchanged.

Inter-Organisation Knowledge-Sharing I move on now to knowledge management issues outside the boundary of a single organisation. There has been much emphasis in recent years on the partnering of organisations, and their interconnection in networks. These initiatives are designed, for example, to exploit synergies between partnering organisations, or to improve links with suppliers and customers. They are normally related to the striving for increased efficiency and speed of response in rapidly changing markets, and inter-organisational information systems (IOS) are often seen as a fundamental component. These systems are increasingly carried over the medium of the Internet, as the scope, familiarity and ease of use of the Net increases. As an illustration of knowledge management in an inter-organisational network, facilitated by IOS, I will outline the results of some of our research on the London Insurance Market (Barrett and Walsham, 1999). The Market is an important part of the UK general insurance industry, built up around Lloyd’s of London. It is a network of hundreds of semi-auton-

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omous players, including underwriting groups, brokerage firms and Market managers. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Market suffered huge insurance losses due to a combination of circumstances. As part of its response to the disastrous financial results, and to the tough competitive climate, the Market sought to develop and use IT to lower costs by streamlining business processes, and to increase service quality and inter-organisational efficiency in the Market. A particular focus for this was to use electronic data interchange (EDI) standards and messages to support inter-organisational communication, and a joint venture called the London Insurance Market Network (LIMNET) was created to develop and manage appropriate systems. LIMNET made significant progress in a number of work areas, including systems for claims management and settlement, and accounting systems. However, the development and use of electronic systems to support the critical area of the negotiation and agreement of insurance business between underwriters and brokers, known as placement, was less successful. A system called LIMNET EPS (electronic placing system) was developed in the early 1990s, but low levels of adoption and use were still being experienced several years later. So, how do we explain the relative success of the inter-organisational systems in facilitating knowledge-sharing in areas such as accounting and claims management, and the relative failure of the EPS? Space prohibits an exhaustive analysis of these questions, but we can gain some insights from our earlier theories of communication and knowledge-sharing. Although they were used across communities and organisations, the accounting and claims systems contained data which adhered to widely shared conventions as to their meaning. Thus the sense-reading and sense-giving processes were relatively unproblematic, and the systems were seen by all parties as helpful in knowledge-sharing. In contrast, the EPS system was seen as highly deficient by many of the Market participants, and less effective than the older approach to risk placement. The traditional method involved face-to-face interaction between an underwriter and a broker, normally in the underwriter’s office. The details of the risk were entered on a paper ‘slip’ and supporting documentation was carried around by the brokers. The new EPS was designed to replace this with the electronic passing of risk packages between brokers and underwriters. Brokers would be responsible for inputting an electronic record of the risk, called the common core record, at the start of the placement process. The concept was that the risk details would then be available to all participants involved in the risk at different stages of its life cycle. The relative failure of this new approach can be analysed as follows. The brokers were normally dealing

with a highly complex risk, such as the loss or damage to a ship for example. They undertook a sensereading process using their specialised tacit knowledge in this area supported by documentary evidence, and then tried to communicate this in a sensegiving process to the underwriter. The underwriter undertook his or her own sense-reading process, and further communication took place with a view to arriving at a deal. The basic reason for the widespread rejection of the EPS was that it was not considered adequate to support this knowledge-sharing and negotiation process since sense-reading and sense-giving are difficult in the area of complex insurance risk, and involve subtle power relations between the negotiating parties. The basic details transmitted electronically through the EPS were thought to be an inadequate representation of this complexity, and face-to-face was considered a more appropriate mode in which to communicate for this particular purpose. In the words of one of the brokers: The business is based largely on relationships and trust. This is why it is so vital to carry out business in a faceto-face manner … You are negotiating the business. It is important how well you put across the case … You use a lot of different skills in negotiating. You emphasise and deemphasise certain aspects, handle objections … It is a sales situation.

This is only one brief example of knowledge-sharing across organisations, and I am not of course arguing that all inter-organisational negotiations need to take place face-to-face, or that inter-organisational information systems are of no value. There have been many successful applications of such systems, including the accounting and claims systems in the London Insurance Market itself. Rather, I am arguing that we need to think very carefully about the sense-reading and sense-giving processes of knowledge-sharing and negotiation in any particular inter-organisational communication process, and ask whether, and to what extent, computer-based systems are adequate to support the processes involved. I frequently book air tickets on-line, using data on web sites with no need for face-to-face negotiation. However, I would not wish to take a new job without visiting the organisation involved, although I might use a web site and other information on the company as one input to my sense-reading process.

Working Across Cultures The complexity of the processes of knowledge generation and sharing takes on a further dimension when we consider work needing to take place across cultures. Lam (1997) provided a fascinating grounded case study of the different approaches to knowledge in both a Japanese and a British high-technology firm, attempting to collaborate on particular joint ventures. Lam examined the education and on-the-job training 605

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of Japanese and British engineers in the two firms, and analysed why they worked in very different ways that made co-operation and knowledge-sharing difficult. The engineers in the British firm based their specialist expertise primarily on abstract theoretical knowledge acquired through formal university training. In contrast the Japanese engineers relied heavily on practical know-how and problem-solving techniques accumulated in their workplace. Product development in the British firm was organised on a sequential and hierarchical basis, with the view that the knowledge required for each stage tended to be relatively self-contained. In contrast, product development in the Japanese firm was typically undertaken by a multi-functional team, consisting of members with diverse backgrounds, and took in all the stages of planning, design and development, quality assurance and production. These differences in educational background, bases of skills, and approach to co-ordination of work were reflected in different methods of ‘knowledge transmission’ through the product cycle. In the British firm, co-ordination across the functions was achieved by passing on detailed documents and full specifications from one stage to the next. This required ‘externalising’ knowledge and coding and structuring it into procedures, guidelines or specifications for transmission to others. In contrast, the Japanese firm was highly dependent on intensive human-networkbased communication. Knowledge required for overall project achievement was seen as being stored ‘organically’ in team relationships and behavioural routines. Attempts were made to get the British and Japanese engineers to work together and to share knowledge, but these were largely unsuccessful. The mutual incomprehension is nicely captured in Lam’s paper by two quotes from a British and Japanese engineer respectively: You’ve got two ways of doing something. You are either very much more rigorous about the way you design it and try to ensure you do it right, or you just have a scatterbrain effect and just hope something will work. This is the way I see the (Japanese firm) … A lot of people do lots of little things and it’s like waiting for revolution. (p. 982) They (the British Engineers) can read the specifications but I am not sure they have the ability to make the product. I think we have far more technical capacity — we’ve got the know-how. On this project, we have to supply them with a lot of our know-how but it’s really difficult. There’s so much of it which simply cannot be captured only by reading the documents. (p. 982)

In the end, the management of the British and Japanese firms abandoned attempts at genuine joint development work between their respective engineers, and divided the work on projects into compart606 EMJ: European Management Journal

ments, leaving each team to pursue its own part of the projects in its own way. What can we learn from the case study using the perspective on knowledge taken in this article? Firstly, I do not wish to make a value judgement between the British and Japanese engineers as to which was the ‘better’ approach to knowledge generation and sharing. However, the sense-reading and sense-giving approaches were radically different in the two groups, and this made the cross-cultural working very difficult. The role of computer systems, although not an explicit focus of Lam’s paper, would also be seen rather differently by the two parties. Clearly, the British engineers saw a bigger role for explicit procedures, guidelines and specifications, which would imply a more significant role for ICTs. On the other hand, the Japanese felt that much of their ‘know-how’ could not be ‘captured only by reading the documents’, implying a greater need for personal contact. The analysis above should not be generalised to conclusions about the infeasibility of cross-cultural team working, or the lack of usefulness of computer-based systems in this context. But, cross-cultural working involves the interaction of people whose tacit knowledge has been developed in different ways, and who have learnt different approaches to sense-reading and sense-giving. A necessary first condition for trying to facilitate effective cross-cultural working is to take these cultural differences seriously. This may seem an obvious remark, but the Lam case is not unique in my experience (Walsham, 2001) in largely ignoring these differences, at least at the project outset. An understanding of the ‘other’ is a good starting point, but it is one thing for a team of British engineers to gain some understanding of Japanese methods of working, but another for them to wish to adopt such methods themselves. Nevertheless, some adaptation and compromise are likely to be necessary on both sides to offer any real chance of effective collaborative work. Choosing an appropriate role for ICTs in the cross-cultural work process is an important issue, but this needs to be located within a broader consideration of how to facilitate effective cross-cultural understanding and knowledge-sharing.

Conclusions The key thrust of this article has been to analyse the benefits and limitations of computer-based systems for knowledge management by taking a humancentred view of knowledge. This approach has emphasised the complex sense-reading and sensegiving processes which human beings carry out in communicating with each other and ‘sharing’ knowledge. McKinlay (2000) provides a quote from an interview that he conducted with the manager of a

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particular knowledge management initiative, which nicely summarises the role of management in supporting such processes: We have to accept that we cannot manage knowledge in the sense of hard wiring a system. We have to allow people to make their own links, to give them the techniques to allow them to construct, interact with knowledge. We can’t put in a technological fix. It’s not about finding specific answers but allowing people to problem solve, gain knowledge in unexpected ways. (p. 117)

I have discussed a number of ways of going about this task in the article. With respect to communitiesof-practice, these approaches include facilitating communication between individuals through methods such as mentor relationships and special interest groups. Other contextual approaches include appropriate reward systems, and the creation of ‘safe’ enclaves for electronic debate. In inter-community knowledge-sharing, organisational translators were noted as one potentially fruitful method. With respect to inter-organisational communication, the nature and complexity of the task at hand should be carefully assessed in choosing between electronic or non-electronic media. The different bases of tacit knowledge in cross-cultural communication imply an approach to knowledge-sharing based on taking other cultures seriously, and the need for adaptation and compromise. The above summary of possible approaches, and the more detailed suggestions in the earlier material, should not be taken as a set of ‘prescriptions’ for all contexts. Each set of circumstances is different, and needs its own methods and processes. Instead of a list of answers, I would like to suggest some questions which should be taken seriously in all contexts. What are the communities-of-practice and inter-community activities which need to be supported? What types of knowledge-sharing are taking place now and what should be taking place? What are the sensereading and sense-giving activities which underpin knowledge-sharing in this context and how can they be improved? How are power relations and organisational politics affecting existing knowledge-sharing activities, and what approaches could be used to mitigate any negative consequences of this? How can ICTs be used in a beneficial way to support and facilitate improved communication and knowledge-sharing? I have deliberately put the ICT question last, since a key argument in this paper is that any consideration of the role and value of computer-based systems for knowledge management should start with the human processes involved rather than with the technology. Information and communication technologies are not the answer to improved knowledgesharing within and between people and organisations. They do not replicate or replace the deep tacit knowledge of human beings which lies at the heart of all human thought and action. Nor do they remove

the need for personal relationships, which normally cannot be developed and maintained effectively solely through electronic media. Nevertheless, I do believe that computer-based systems can be of benefit to human activity if we are careful about assessing their benefits and limitations in supporting the development and communication of human meaning. I have tried to make a small contribution to such an assessment in this paper.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Michael Barrett, Niall Hayes and Mark Thompson to some of the ideas used in this paper.

References Barrett, M. and Walsham, G. (1999) Electronic trading and work transformation in the London insurance market. Information Systems Research 10(1), 1–22. Brown, J.S. (1998) Internet technology in support of the concept of ‘communities-of-practice’: the case of Xerox. Accounting, Management and Information Technologies 8(4), 227–236. Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. (1991) Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation. Organization Science 2(1), 40–57. Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. (1998) Organizing knowledge. California Management Review 40(3), 90–111. Davenport, T.H., De Long, D.W. and Beers, M.C. (1998) Successful knowledge management projects. Sloan Management Review 39(2), 43–57. Foucault, M. (1977) Two lectures. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon. Pantheon Books, New York. Hayes, N. and Walsham, G. (2000) Safe enclaves, political enclaves and knowledge working. In Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning, eds C. Prichard, R. Hull, M. Chumer and H. Willmott, pp. 69– 87. Macmillan, Basingstoke. Lam, A. (1997) Embedded firms, embedded knowledge: problems of collaboration and knowledge transfer in global cooperative ventures. Organization Studies 18(6), 973–996. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Maznevski, M.L. and Chudoba, K.M. (2000) Bridging space over time: global virtual team dynamics and effectiveness. Organization Science 11(5), 473–492. McDermott, R. (1999) Why information technology inspired but cannot deliver knowledge management. California Management Review 41(4), 103–117. McKinlay, A. (2000) The bearable lightness of control: organisational reflexivity and the politics of knowledge management. In Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning, eds C. Prichard, R. Hull, M. Chumer and H. Willmott, pp. 107–121. Macmillan, Basingstoke. Newell, S., Scarbrough, H., Swann, J. and Hislop, D. (2000) Intranets and knowledge management: de-centred technologies and the limits of technological discourse. In Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning, eds C. Prichard, R. Hull, M. Chumer and H. Willmott, pp. 88–106. Macmillan, Basingstoke. Nonaka, I. (1994) A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science 5(1), 14–37. Orlikowski, W.J. (1996) Evolving with notes: organizational change around groupware technology. In Groupware and

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Teamwork: Invisible Aid or Technical Hindrance?, ed. C.U. Ciborra. Wiley, Chichester. Polanyi, M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Polanyi, M. (1969) Knowing and Being. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Thompson, M. and Walsham, G. (2001) Learning to value

bardic tradition: culture, communication and organisational knowledge. In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Information Systems, eds S. Smithson, J. Gricar, M. Podlogar and S. Avgerinou, pp. 706–714. Moderna Organizacija, Kranz (Slovenia). Walsham, G. (2001) Making a World of Difference: IT in a Global Context. Wiley, Chichester.

GEOFF WALSHAM, Judge Institute of Management Studies, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB1 1AG. Email: g.walsham@jims. cam.ac.uk Geoff Walsham is Research Professor of Management Studies at the Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge University, UK. His teaching and research is centred on the social and management aspects of the design and use of information and communication technologies, in the context of both industrialised and developing countries. His publications include Interpreting Information Systems in Organizations (Wiley, 1993), and Making a World of Difference: IT in a Global Context (Wiley, 2001).

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