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146 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

forms often make it challenging or impossible for organizations to rely on
face-to-face communication and personal networks for the sharing of informa-
tion and knowledge. This is the case whether this be:
1. General communications for the whole organization (e.g. the organizational
vision, goals or values) that are communicated through platform technolo-
gies, or,
2. Communications for a sub-group of employees (e.g. the budget statement
for all VPs, or information about progress for all those involved in a large
software project) that are communicated through channel technologies.
While KM initiatives are often structural in nature, there are also new forms of
ICT that can potentially accommodate a more processual/practice orientation.
These allow observation of the processes and practices through which knowledge
is created, and accept that the same content can be interpreted differently across
communities. With the advent of what is sometimes called Web 2.0 or Enterprise
2.0, for example, it is now possible for documents to be created collectively using
technologies like google.doc, sharepoint and wikis of all kinds. These technolo-
gies crucially allow people to engage in a process of joint knowledge creation
and as well as to observe the product of that effort (McAfee, 2006). Moreover,
with social networking software applications (including Facebook, Myspace
LinkedIn, various kinds of blogs and YouTube), it is now possible for people
to conduct online discussions and share a variety of multimedia content. These
technologies, in other words, can facilitate interaction and expose practices of
knowing as individuals create and recreate content in cyberspace. We will explore
these practice-based KMS at the end of this chapter once we have discussed the
dominant structural approaches of KMS and Enterprise Systems.
We illustrate in this chapter the problems of an exclusively structural KMS-
approach to managing knowledge through exploring the ICC case at the end
of the chapter. This consulting company had introduced a KMS in order to
facilitate knowledge sharing between people geographically distributed across its
global network. However, it did not produce the results that were anticipated.

>> THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF CURRENT ENTERPRISE
SYSTEMS

Enterprise Systems (a more generic term for the kind of Enterprise Resource
Planning or ERP systems, introduced in Chapter 3) are currently very popular in
organizations because of their potential ability to streamline business processes
across the value chain (Davenport, 2000; Kumar and Hillegersberg, 2000).
Enterprise Systems (also based very much on an epistemology of possession)
assume that knowledge about successful organizational practices within a par-
ticular industry can be identified, captured and embedded in software and so
transferred across organizations. From this perspective, current Enterprise Sys-
tems initiatives can be seen as a direct descendant of the much earlier Scientific

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