The success of information system development involving multi-organizational collaboration can depend heavily on effective knowledge sharing across boundaries. This paper reports on a comparative examination of knowledge sharing in two separate networks of public sector organizations participating in information technology innovation projects in New York State. As is typical of innovations resulting from recent government reforms, the knowledge sharing in these cases is a critical component of the information system development, involving a mix of tacit, explicit, and interactional forms of sharing across organizational boundaries. In one case the sharing is among state agencies and in the other across state and local government agencies. Using interviews, observations and document analysis, the longitudinal case studies follow knowledge sharing and other interactions in the interorganizational networks of these two distinct settings. Results confirm the difficulty of sharing knowledge across agencies, and further reveal the influences of several relevant factors-incentives, risks and barriers for sharing, and trust-on the effectiveness of knowledge sharing. The results contribute to theory on knowledge sharing processes in multi-organizational public sector settings and provide practice guidance for developing effective sharing relationships in collaborative crossboundary information system initiatives.

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In this article, we analyze an exercise in a facilitation process by showing that the structuring of this episode can be studied just by highlighting how different forms of agency (human and non-human) articulate with each other. The objective of this study is threefold: first, it aims at demonstrating that structuring effects can indeed be identified through a bottom-up approach without resorting to any form of duality or dualism, as it is common to think in the traditional literature in organizational studies (Conrad & Haynes, 2001); second, through this analysis, it illustrates the analytical power of such an approach by showing how it allows us to identify specific strategies used by the facilitators to do their work, especially in the way they select who or what is acting in a chain of agencies; third, it illustrates how the attribution of agency to artifacts allows human participants to progress throughout the facilitation process by enabling them to objectify what they are supposed to think and wish for, a process that Weick (1979) has identified as the bulk of organizing processes.

Advocates of geographic information technologies (GIT)have long claimed significant advantages to bringing a spatially oriented perspective to bear on organizational and policy decision making, however, for a variety of reasons, these advantages have been more difficult to realize in practice than might be supposed. In this article, we argue that awareness and appreciation of the potential value of GIT changed dramatically as a result of the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks on September 11, 2001. We use a structurationist theoretical perspective to show that GITs were "enacted" in a variety of novel ways by social actors thrust together by the demands of the crisis to form interorganizational systems, and we illustrate this process through three extended examples of GIT adaptation and innovation during the crisis. One lasting consequence of this episode is that GITs have moved from serving as a relatively static reference tool to a dynamic decision-making tool for emergency situations. We conclude by suggesting that the crisis was a catalyst for change in the use of GIT and, reciprocally, in the social structures in which GIT will be deployed in the future.

Geographic information technologies (GIT) have the potential to integrate information among multiple organizations. In fact, some of the most impressive advantages of using geo-spatial data are derived from the power of bringing together geographic data covering territories that may well be administered by different organizations and from layering geographic data with other social and demographic data sets. However, building the GIT infrastructure necessary for interoperability and integration has been very challenging. Technical capabilities are available, but organizational, institutional and political factors are seen as powerful barriers. Using structuration theory, this paper argues that the World Trade Center crisis was a catalyst for a change in the conceptualization of GIT for emergency response and, consequently, much was learned about interoperability and interorganizational geographic information systems.