Knowledge sharing using IT service management tools: conflicting discourses and incompatible practices

Abstract

ICT applications that include functionality for knowledge sharing are routinely used by IT service providers even though their implementation is known to be problematic and the reasons for such problems not well understood. To shed\ud light on the issue, we collected data at two organisations where managers had provided IT service support workers with IT service management (ITSM) tools incorporating functionality for knowledge sharing. Using critical discourse analysis\ud and rhetorical analysis techniques, we contrasted primary data representative of IT service support practice with other primary and publicly available secondary data reflecting the prevailing discourse of IT service managers. Through this analysis, we identify an apparent dissonance between ITSM managerial and worker discourses that reflect opposing epistemologies. Managers are optimistic about the benefits of ICT-based knowledge sharing, whereas the practice of workers is revealed to privilege self-reliance and interpersonal knowledge sharing. By taking a dual, management–worker, perspective, we provide fresh insight into why ICT-based knowledge sharing is problematic. As a theoretical contribution, we propose that dysfunctional intra-organisational conflict can arise where incompatiblemanagement and worker practices become institutionalised through the simultaneous diffusion of conflicting discourses

‘An end to the job as we know it’: how an IT professional has experienced the uncertainty of IT outsourcing

“…Practice-based perspectives on knowledge sharing have consistently flagged up the problematic nature of such objectivist epistemological assumptions, specifically the difficulty of 'transferring' tacit knowledge and practised skill (e.g. Trusson et al, 2014).…”

The rhetoric of “knowledge hoarding”: a research-based critique

“…Larkin, 2014;Trusson et al, 2014;Ford et al, 2015), by conceptualising 'knowledge hoarding' as a rhetorical (i.e.…”

“…Newell, 1999;Butler and Murphy, 2007) including difficulties associated with objectification of complex tacit knowledge into useful explicit forms (Panahi et al, 2013). Indeed, the authors of this paper have previously reported on how the managements at the five organizations studied here had made KMDBSs available to their workforces but that engagement with them was limited: notably, (i) IT service professionals prioritized their core responsibility to resolve service incidents over writing up knowledge to send into a database, and (ii) when engaged in investigating service incidents they tended to preference self-reliant problem-solving, drawing on colleagues and other knowledge resources as they considered most appropriate for their needs (Trusson et al, 2014). Thus, drawing on rhetorical theory (Billig, 1996, p. 231), the 'common sense' of the workforces about efficient working and knowledge sharing conflicted with the managerial 'common sense' of the 'best practice' guidelines that rhetorically accused the workforces of knowledge hoarding because they tended to not use the KMDBSs imposed by management.…”

Managing Knowledge and Managing Knowledge Work: What we know and what the Future holds

“…In the cognitive model, knowledge is viewed as an entity that exists in a particular user's brain or in a collective's routines and can be captured, codified, packaged and handed over to someone else to reuse. By contrast, the community model views knowledge as existing in practices and shared through participation in these practices (see Trusson et al, 2013, for an account that depicts a discrepancy between managerial assumptions about the usefulness of a KMS based on a cognitive model and workers' actual knowledge practices, which privilege selfreliance and interpersonal knowledge sharing, i.e., represented by the community model). As another example of a typology, Hansen et al (1999) distinguish between different KM strategies and identify a codification vs a personalization strategy.…”