Examining knowledge management: Identifying the discontinuity of organizational memory and introducing knowledge-based action (KBA) as a replacement concept

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ABSTRACT

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INTRODUCTION

One of the mantras of most industries today are that they are knowledge-intensive, and that it is the thinking behind work that separates the great from the ordinary. Naturally, successfully managing businesses means managing knowledge. Pooling and sharing resources makes sure that knowledge is not privileged or idle. This paper reexamines collaborative knowledge management, and identifies certain gaps in the way the concept is structured and used. It turns out to be generally vague and especially when it comes to building collaborative tools to make sure that knowledge work is not needlessly repeated. Our case study is globally distributed shipbuilding. We identify four types of knowledge-based action that we think needs to be supported, rather than aiming to implement an organizational memory. This analysis is reflected in a conceptual framework, on top of which we also propose an event-driven architecture for information sharing through an improved document repository.
Author Keywords

Collaborative document control, distributed and concurrent engineering, organizational learning and memory, knowledge management.
ACM Classification Keywords

H.3 Information storage and retrieval, H.5.3 [Group and Organization Interfaces]: Computer supported cooperative work. H.1.1 - Systems and Information Theory.

It has been an underlying tenet of CSCW that it supports highly reflective work processes, such as those of designers, emergency personnel, air traffic controllers and, of course, the researchers themselves. Hence, it has also brought with it from the beginning an ambition to support knowledge management, collective remembering and an organizational memory. It has combined this with a positive perspective, mainly from IS and business studies, that such knowledge is a deeper dimension of information, and as such much more valuable yet also harder to deal with in terms of computer support. This paper challenges the notion of collective knowledge management and, indeed, that it is expressing a viable strategy. It points to distinct gaps that need to be identified, negotiated and, if possible, repaired, in order for collaborative knowledge work to take place. These gaps in processes, discourse, in roles and between business models are termed discontinuous, and prove that the notion of knowledge management as well as many advanced CSCW concepts such as that of boundary objects and awareness, are still in their infancy. A much more critical, empirically discerning approach is needed, if we want to use them to build robust theories as well as technology to support co-operative work beyond small, homogenous groups typically found in research labs and universities. This paper represents a step in that direction, through its analytical pitch as well as by introducing a new concept, which is knowledge-based action.
Data, information, knowledge

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Managers generally agree that information would have had even greater value, if it only could have been shared more seamlessly between individuals as well as companies. Knowledge repositories have been implemented in many organizations, but they often suffer from non-use . Hence, knowledge engineering and organizational memory have easily got a grip on the information systems

and collaborative computing area. Their merit is simply obvious. But is it really that simple? Because, on the other hand it is also obvious that companies often compete, indeed, even within companies, so do individuals. This means that information, albeit a straightforward, it seems, representation of knowledge, is not always (if ever) shared in the way that fits with the idea of a common knowledge repository .
Research challenge

does not result from confusion or indifference; there are many activities, although they seem to lead nowhere. Previous work, to a large extent, has been based on an indication that some strategy of standardization might have to be in place. Looking at it like this, one extreme is to define a concrete, common data model. It provides a meta-level representation of our universe of discourse, which we then may populate with different (yet similar) instances, with no loss of precision, conflicts or even redundancies, if we have done a good job to start with. An alternative, which may not be very different in the end of the day, is to provide a method of meta-data markup. Ontologies may be created either way, and it is certainly a useful approach to sharing data , but it is not within the scope of this paper to discuss it further . The problem seems to be that it is one out of many technical approaches to knowledge management, which has not made it very successful. What, then, can we do about that? Our vision, responding to these challenges, has ended up being to try replacing what we see as futile contentoriented labeling with event-based information architectures that publish changes of state, rather than the content itself.
RESEARCH METHOD

One important observation in this particular context is that knowledge (in the intuitive sense of it as know-how or skills), is of course not an imaginary phenomenon. Parties of working life (as well as on the football pitch or in the kitchen at home, etc.) clearly shat that they can do what other parties would like to be able to as well, and try to mimic, but cannot, even if their premises are equal in terms of the information that they have. One easily (albeit disputable, we agree, since luck may well play the biggest part) example is the stock market, where de juris all parties have access to the same information and the assumption hence would be that they should all be equally able to predict the future. Still, the (perceived) de facto situation (represented in huge variances in fees) seems to be that they know and act differently. Another, more complicated arena, is the international shipbuilding industry, in which customers, operators, ship yards and engineering capacity is globally distributed, and the cost of skill minimal compared to the cost of steel and labor. Still, some yards in certain regions build better ships faster than others. Optimism prevails, thus, upon the premise that the sum is greater than the sum of the parts. The x-factor might in another context have been termed culture, but in terms of scale and normative support, know-how has been, in industrial as well as IT terms, the preferred scope. Therefore, we find that criticism of organizational memory as being naively modeling a deeply cognitive process as a storage bin , is being ignored. After all, human beings are able to share their experiences, and experiences are the foundation of knowledge. The intuitive value of knowledge to the enterprise, when looked at as its primary asset, means that the benefits are greatly outweighing the struggle to get it right, and so we keep on trying. Unfortunately, industrially nothing much has really happened in this area for the past 15 years. SharePoint is still state-of-the-art, except when a strategic turn has been taken towards SAP, or a similar ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. In terms of publications and outlets, the knowledge management area has matured, without many new findings. In terms of impact, it boils down to companies basing their activities and analysis on workflow for procedure or deciding to use a common server as a document- and email repository. This inertia

This paper is not a traditionally empirical paper. Although it is based on interviews and on observation, they have not taken place (as of yet) systematically and in order to theorize from the ground up. Rather, the project is currently in an action research-type of stage, in which the researcher is part of a team looking into the possibilities of improving computer support for collaborative document management in the maritime sector. Starting from the action research process model as it was described by Baskerville , we can say that our project is still in the diagnosing stages (Figure 1). The researcher is partaking in the development of ideas and technology, as well as contributing to meetings with customers, discipline coordinators, project leaders and managers at the ship yards, as well as planning ahead to later stages, in which we are going to enter stages of change management and technology implementation in order to generate new knowledge. It could be argued that an action research-based research endeavor has to be much further developed, in order to produce significant and novel findings. In this paper, however, the action research setting provides a backdrop with observations still on a relatively high-level and abstract format. This is still a valid research contribution, we assert, since the phenomena that we describe are observably there, with suitable robustness for the

diagnosis stages. More details are going to be collected and compiled in order to bolster a detailed, technical design, at later stages of this research. We believe that the industrial perspective of this research makes it relevant and interesting to a CSCW audience, and it serves as sufficient context to motivate and assess what we wanted to achieve. It is a crucial part of all research to develop and present well-founded hypothesis and this as part of the current endeavor as well. Along that path an analytical framework is being developed and put forward as well.

THE GRAIL OF KNOWLEDGE

In our modern world-view, the role of knowledge is distinctly pivotal . It represents the advancement of our welfare and morality. What really prevents us from getting back on the moon is that we do not remember how to build [] rockets. [] [When] engineers went back to retrieve the plans, the microfiche had decayed into unusable form, no usable paper copies could be found, and [] engineers had not been taught the fundamental issues of that time . This gives rise as well, to a management strategy of encouraging and putting knowledge further up on the pedestal: Knowledge is an organizations most valuable resources, because it represents intangible assets, operational routines, and creative processes that are hard to imitate [] .
Definition of knowledge

Figure 1: The action research process model

Before we describe our case study and the challenges pertaining to this industry due to its distributed and competencies-intensive stages, however, we shall try to unpack and come to grips with the notion of knowledge management, which is one of the prevailing strategies as well as part of the explanation that the maritime clusters do well in an international competition, in spite of their high-cost wages and equalitarian work life structure.
THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

In order to be able to discuss and suggest IT-support for knowledge management extraneously to one single persons mind and intentions, we clearly have to have a working definition of the concept: Knowledge may, as many do in this literature, be seen as justified beliefs that increase the capacity to take action . But, there are many forms of knowledge, and by implication thus beliefs, for instance :

This paper takes the stance that the obvious strategy (of getting to know what we are going to talk about, and how we are going to do first), it is a reasonable one. The premise is sound, namely that we can only talk about what we know [Wittgenstein]. This has got two fundamental challenges; one is philosophically oriented towards a priori knowledge, which is a platform on top of which we may bootstrap ourselves upward as we interact with each other. The other has got to do with trust.

Propositional (descriptive, declarative), which is explicit and subject to review, according to its internal logic. This does not provide any more top-down information about the concept of knowledge, however. Personal knowledge may be explicit or implicit, and comprises personal resources of a cognitive or experiential character. Skills and the knowhow of procedures and processes is also personal knowledge. Eraut places various subcategories of knowledge within personal knowledge, as opposed to explicit, codified, propositional knowledge, e.g., episodic and tacit .

Situated knowledge is defined by Sole and Edmonson as knowledge embedded in the work practices of a particular organizational site . Partial knowledge, intuitively, is knowledge of some of a phenomenons parts, or part-knowledge of its whole, but clearly this presumes an underlying phenomenon that is well defined and finite, which is limiting. Many directions of more meta-physical and philosophical

discourse attempts to pin down the notion of knowledge, for instance to unpack properly the notions of a priori knowledge, which anticipates empirical evidence and a posteriori knowledge, which is based on experience . In this paper, we will not pursue this quest for the ultimate definition of knowledge much further, except assert that definitions of knowledge all recursively seems to hinge, indeed, on some a priori understanding of the knowledge concept. Let us therefore, in the next instance, look at the knowledge life-cycle, in order to understand the concept from the perspective of how it is being used. The purpose of this exercise is the strip it down to an instrumentally useful notion, which is centered on documentation, rather than knowledge.

Understanding the knowledge life-cycle

There are many perspectives on how our world-view (to try to avoid operationalizing the concept of knowledge prematurely) is represented. The distinction between data, information or knowledge is common in the Information Systems (IS) research field, and it comprises a hierarchy with knowledge as the internalized information, which in its turn is stored as data. This topology can easily be criticized for lack of precision or consistency , but taken at face value it anyway stands for a view of knowledge as existing only within an agent, a knower, shaped and communicated through information. Information has a semantic bearing to aid its representation, without which it is data. This bearing, as such, also have to be represented in data, en recursively thus information can be defined as data with meaning. If it can have multiple interpretations (including being unintelligible), then it is not information. Simply said, data is any representation that has no more than syntactical qualities, which is open to an observer. Information is data with semantic qualities, the observer know what it means and can become a holder. Knowledge is information with pragmatic qualities; the holder knows how to use it, i.e., how to become a user of the information. This simple conceptual exercise indicates that knowledge management is a higher term then information system, since it explicitly requires sufficient support towards being able to use the information that is presented. Knowledge is in this perspective a state of mind , and a privileged one inasmuch as it enables purposeful and efficient handling, re-presentation and action by an agent. Alternative views of knowledge as an object that can be stored and manipulated, a documented process or the advantage of access to information, are sufficiently indepth described and discussed by Alavi and Leidner . All definitions of knowledge as manifestly represented fail to make it significantly different from the broadly scoped notion of information, and hence the topic of knowledge management also collapses . Since there are distinct and observable behavior that members as well as the organizations themselves allegedly may display, which other cannot easily mimic even given access to the same information as they have, then this elimination is probably not a good idea.
Knowledge categorization

It is, on the background of the above discussion, questionable whether it is fruitful to dive deeper into the taxonomy of a concept that has turned out to be inconsistently treated in the literature, but keeping in mind that we seem to be moving towards a working definition of knowledge as the innumerable, inexplicable aspect of an agents capacity, the discussion is going to provide some novel ideas about knowledge.

One of the distinctions, which needs to be cancelled out in this perspective of knowledge, is the separation between explicit and implicit knowledge. All knowledge is implicit, since it is display only by observable (or accountable to/as) action. This is not the same as tacit, which according to Polanyis original discussion seems to be the character of bolstering the task to which we are attending, whilst not at the same time needing attention itself. What is subsidiarily known is tacitly known; but it seems appropriate to extend the meaning of tacit knowing to include the integration of subsidiary to focal knowing. The structure of tacit knowing is then the structure of this integrative process, and knowing is tacit to the extent to which it has such a structure. So if (as it will appear) all knowing ultimately relies on a tacit process of knowing, we shall say that, ultimately, all knowledge has the structure of tacit knowledge . The degree of tacitness is reduced as and when we turn our focal attention towards this knowledge, but ultimately this maneuver will push other qualities of our thinking into the background so that they become subsidiary knowledge, ie., tacit, and destroying this character in the process. Nonaka picks up the idea of tacit knowledge, however, the meaning is slightly altered so that it instead resembles implicit. Using then, in reality, the distinction between explicit and implicit, he goes on to describes organizational processes for knowledge creation , which on the other hand is quite useful: From tacit to tacit (socialization); From tacit to explicit (externalization); From explicit to explicit (combination); and From explicit to tacit (internalization).

argument, infinite, since it refers to knowledge about knowledge etc. A little less trivial, perhaps, is the distinction between individual knowledge and collective knowledge, and Spender is among the authors addressing knowledge management systems directly, who see collective knowledge as something else than the sum or sharing of individual knowledge. Rather, he sees it as the institutionalized practices affiliated with interaction between members . Pulling this into the notion of knowledge that we are developing, we notice that it is observable differences in how people in different organizations interact, and the patterns of interactions may provably and explicitly be ethnographically described. The complimentary sets of collective knowledge are thus, the one that is described and the one that is not. These two sets must according to classical logics law of the excluded middle, cover out entire universe of discourse (set of all propositions). The conclusion, thus, from this rather brief excursion into the knowledge and related concepts, is that a knowledge algebra seems to be possible, for which the notion of knowledge as it is used in the literature, denotes a humanoid (i.e. easily anthropomorphized) is not yet documented, inexplicable or hidden, yet demonstrable by an agent through behavior or attitudes. This definition yields the property that all knowledge may be documented, at the same time that there will always be an infinite and innumerable quantity left as bestand with the agent holding it .
BUILDING OFFSHORE SHIPS

There is, in this perspective, a possibility to transfer knowledge directly (without going via the manifest representation as a document), by mimicking the desired behavior directly, or taking guidance by the sanctions or rewards offered by a community until one is regarded as a member of that group. Knowledge may also be (termed as) general or specific . It may be further decomposed, or re-categorized, into being procedural (about how things ought to happen), causal (about why things happen or how to use certain methods/strategies. Alternative notions are semantic (for documented/explicit) and episodic or situated (when it is contextually applied). Some authors use the term conditional knowledge, to refer to the knowledge about when and how to apply the knowledge . The recursive character may be taken to mean also that the total amount of knowledge is, in a language game-type of the

Our case is looking at the maritime industry of ship building. It is a global business, which entails a liberal set of market spheres, with regards to work life regulation, salaries, cultures and demographics of skill in the population. In other words, work is going to travel to parts of the work where it is best and cheapest performed, and parts are going to return to be assembled as close as possible within this constraint, to the place where the ship is going to operate. Typically, this means that the design could be made in Norway, typically in interaction with a ship owner, who is ultimately the customer of the project, operating in the Gulf of Mexico but registered in Spain, the engineering work could be finished in Germany, the ships hull in Romania, the specialized parts (e.g, seismic streamers) produced in Houston for everything to be assembled and tested in Philadelphia.

RESULTS

Trying to apply the research frameworks from knowledge Figure we find a disturbing discrepancy. management, 2: The traditional supply chain model In this section, I am going to summarize the most important The traditional portrait of the supply chain is shown in

Figure 2. It is traditional to draw it as a linear process, with smooth and planned transitions. A more advance, but stylized still, representation can be found in Figure 3. It explicates some of the concurrency of distributed engineering (of which there is more) and introduces a contractual dynamics, called contract logistics, which is needed to negotiate the terms of phase transitions and smoothen the incompatibilities which have been consciously or as a side effect been introduced into the product. Many extraneous discrepancies will be reified into the product, and for most of them is neither unexpected nor easily dealt with, since they stem from lack of insight into the unknown or simply misunderstandings, e.g., of specifications or terms.

that the meet the twofold orthogonal level of specifications, which is one the one side about what they are going to be able to carry, and on the other side, about matching size and weight consideration put forward by the designers.
Knowledge-based action discontinuous learning 2: Dealing with

The leap, which is what is needed, between phases is also managed on each side of the gap by professionals that have different roles. These are not social roles, but roles stipulated by organizational affiliation and the contracts that they work under. Indeed, the specifications tend to be read as contracts, which explain even more about the nature of the discrepancies when the roles oppose each other in a contractual relationship. When roles are not in competitive relationships to each other, there is still (or particularly now) a difficulty in sharing documentation and facilitating learning, since the degree of specialization is so great that it hinders efficient communication between people. Individuals are to a greater extent than organizations hampered by different (complementary) perspectives, since their capacity (due to its cognitive nature) is more binary. Either a person understands an electrical wiring diagram or he does not. An organization may always be able to recruit permanent or temporary work forces to address a certain type of problem. The organizations challenges are more likely to be of a cultural sort.
Knowledge-based action 3: discontinuous opportunity (flows) Dealing with

Figure 3: A slightly more concurrent view of the ship building process

Our findings, which will be presented in the guise of break-downs, i.e., the concrete and observable situation in which the dominant concepts or trends from knowledge management does not work, are different and go deeper, since they result from gaps in the structure, and especially gaps between how it is presented, perceived and planned (re. both figures above) vs. how it is actually conducted.
KNOWLEDGE-BASED ACTION 1: DEALING WITH DISCONTINUOUS RESPONSIBILITIES

We find that, unlike software engineering, in which the implementation process, correctly or not, is seen as a mapping from one level of abstraction to another, the building of ships is different. It is different in the sense that one phase of design does not in principle translate descriptions through stepwise refinement; instead they represent entirely different areas of responsibility. For instance, the designers may be responsible for the efficient layout of the top deck, according the specification of future operation, e.g., in terms of placing the cranes accordingly. The engineers, in the next instance, do not change, refine or re-define the placement into another description that has another and more finely grained level of placement information. Instead they decide which cranes to choose, from which vendor, so

It is inevitable in a cluster of firms, and given the dynamics that exist in a largely international and highly price and skills distribution-sensitive area, that companies will change. Some companies will go under and others arise. Of the ones that arise, many will originate from the practices and people of the companies that were already there, either through people leaving, teaming up with people from other companies, or variances of management-buy outs or splits. No functional area of the supply chain will thus be without competition, and careless action from one of companies may contribute to create another competitor for it or a partner. The KBA thus entails to establish necessary room to maneuver based on a variety of dimensions, such as trustworthiness, respect for people and their professional standing, which in the next instance requires people to know each other from previous interaction. This is, hence, a KBA, which needs to be bootstrapped in the sense that familiarity-aspects also comes into play. Time is needed to establish the relationships.

Knowledge-based action 4: Dealing with the lack of co-operative initiatives

On an individual level, the cultural, practical and incentive-based anchoring in one organization as opposed to another, is going to be representing structures that hinder mutual exchange of information and a build-up of

The discontinuity map: Org. level of knowledge-based: Discourse CultureResponsibilityOpportunityIndividual level of knowledge-based: Cognition

Learning InitiativesComplimentary rolesCompeting

rolesFigure 4: Proposed discontinuity map

oriented, towards the cognitive rather the organizational (which is the individuals raison detre within the roles that they have, anyway). CSCW on the other hand, is easily criticized for many things, but most importantly for being too oriented towards small, homogeneous groups without the strict and strong organizational context of business life. Thus the alternative dimension to be spanned out here is in addition to of complimentary (and harmonious) roles, we chose to look at it with the perspective of competition. That competition should point towards non-adoption of KMS is perhaps not so strange [cf. Orlikowskis argument , but our findings are more surprisingly and to-the-point that complimentary roles represent just as great challenges of a different nature. We can hence wee clearly that the important contribution of this paper is (as was intended in the first place) to explicate the non-trivial and un-notices challenges of KM, which have perhaps been at the core of its failure so far.
DESIGN IMPLICATIONS

knowledge, even if this is something that both companies in this mini-cluster could be seen to benefit from. This cannot be bootstrapped, since the KBA needed to bridge the gaps requires doing less of, or counter-act, some of the identity-building exercises within companies, that have positive effects in other areas. A KBA for dealing with this gap needs to be supported is going to have to be consciously designed to bridge different cultures.
Knowledge-based action 5: Dealing discontinuous multi-perspective discourse with

The final category of KBA that at KMS needs to be designed to support, is the bridging of the gap between individual and collective action, i.ee., the approaching of an organizations intention versus and individuals responsiveness, or vice versa. This is perhaps the most demanding of all, and requires through knowledge of the formal hierarchies of organizations to be internalized within it collaborators on an individual level, to the extreme degree that they know who is approached, who can be trusted and who is reliable in terms of re-anchoring a concern within their host company in an efficient manner. One way of summarizing this set of challenges would be along two dimensions. One is of the role network, in which roles are either complimentary or competing. The other would be of the macro-level of organizations in the supply chain, vs. individuals within and between companies. Hence, (in a sense) it designates the level of the discourse, rather than the agency. More importantly, however, for our discussion in the next instance, it is to be able to span out the extremes of knowledge management as a reasoning discipline. We have in the introduction to this paper criticized it for being much to individually

It seems optimistic to think that throwing more technology at the problem is going to be fundamental to crossing the chasms. Granted, technology can be the bridge, but for strategic and tactical reason, those bridges will not be passed. Hence, an alternative approach must be found, altogether. The proposal of this paper is that we look at other aspects of work in and between organizations, and support those rather than to try to share the content as is. Specifically we suggest an eXtremely Event-Based Information Architectures (XEBIA), which has not been implemented in this particular, case yet, but will be offered as a conceptual design. The approach has been tested with success in the other domains, however, and the examples from here will be briefly described in order to provide a proof-of-concept evaluation. Further work will take that approach further into the oil & gas/maritime domain.

DISCUSSION

We have found, in the examination of the concept of knowledge management as it can be found in the literature, as well as by the case study in the ship building industry that we have introduced, that the idea of capturing, storing, mediating and managing knowledge suffers from its entirely cognitive orientation. We decided that an organizational perspective was needed to complement it, but equally important was the deconstruction of the deconstruction of the concept. The purposeless re-categorization of the idea of knowledge into multifarious sub-categories and types brings us astray. Instead, this paper suggests simply that knowledge is what we have not (yet/been able to) show into documents. This is related to the ideas about knowledge that is so forcefully communicated by Wittgenstein with the analogy of the beetle in the box , but the observation of this paper is about building on that, rather than providing another example of it. Moreover, we have wanted to show how a set of knowledge-based action types are needed to be taken by actors in order to close the discontinuity gaps in so-called knowledge management. A technical architecture based on a metalevel events communication, rather than content communication, may then alleviate some of the problems in current knowledge management, by supporting knowledge-based action. Knowledge-based action is not the same as skills, which is an evasive enough notion, cf. nearly always being categorized as tacit, craftsmanshiplike knowledge . Summarizing the paper, finally, it seems that a vague concept (of knowledge) is being further decomposed within the field of research called knowledge management, but to no avail. The starting point needs to be considered. The inescapable conclusion of this analysis of the 'knowledge management' idea is that it is, in large part, a management fad, promulgated mainly by certain consultancy companies []. Our suggestion has been to look at the events driving content, rather than the content directly, and this is the path that we want to take for our future research.
CONCLUSION

yet need to be coherently documented in order to complete difficult engineering tasks. Distribution has been observed across companies, models and individual roles, geographically as well as in terms of business scope. Their pertaining knowledge work, thus, have been incompletely supported, fragmented and inefficient. We have introduced the term of discontinuity and proposed a discontinuity map in order to deal with such break-downs, firstly to identify and describe them, next to come up with a repair strategy which has been extremely event-based. In the context of CSCW, the stakeholder and supply chain network perspective is novel and value-adding, since it may contribute to making CSCW more industrially relevant. Previous work on knowledge management in CSCW has been oriented towards the individuals role within organizations and the cognitive processes of getting, transferring and storing knowledge. This knowledge management perspective has produced ample publication with little concrete bearing on ITdevelopment. This is a typical challenge for applied research in IS, but particularly blatant in the knowledge management perspective: We have approached a domain for which IT-support is crucially and widely available, but the conceptual bearing is, in contradistinction to current CSCW, noticeably lacking. The companies of the kind which we have studied use SAP, Lotus Notes and SharePoint, but are only scratching the surface in terms of the potential of such tools to support supply chain-wide organizational memory. Hence, the take-away messages in this paper is on the one hand a critical perspective on knowledge management from CSCW and IS as being too narrowly cognitive and lacking relevance for technology development, on the other hand it is an event-driven architecture which may provide an even more solid basis for the notion to be fruitful in an distributed engineering context, than the current document- and database-based infrastructures that they have so far deployed. The analysis of this paper was intended to provide some food for thought for both sides of the gap, and eventually some design principles for one possible bridge to cross it with.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea of knowledge being management is an example of discursive abstractism that continues to move the support that we are designing, theoretically and technically, away from the phenomenon that we are, indeed, trying too hard to support. We have presented an integration-oriented view of collaborative work processes, with particular emphasis of how those processes have been multifariously distributed,

We thank everybody who has contributed with viewpoints and access to field sites, as well as the generous founding of XXX.
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