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system might be used to standardize customer data used across departments;
in a healthcare setting, an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system might be
used to standardize patient data to be shared across different doctors; while in
a university, an e-learning system might be used to create a standard learning
environment for sharing information with students. Achieving this integrated
system infrastructure depends on instituting standardized business/organizational
practices so that the same processes are followed, meaning the data is consistent
and standard across the organization.
Knowledge workers are certainly not immune from the influences of such
standardizing processes. For example, university teachers are often required
to use an e-learning course management system or some other kind of educa-
tional repository to communicate with their classes. ‘Blackboard’, for example,
is designed around a particular ‘best practice’ vision of what a ‘class’ consists
of and what type of information needs to be communicated between a teacher
and their students. So, there is a button for announcements, syllabus, course
documents, assignments, communication and so on that presumes a particular
type of lecturing practice. Of course, individual professors will use this func-
tionality somewhat differently, but nevertheless, the material design of the ICT
constrains what they can do. Moreover, the system may well be a mechanism
used by administrators to control the behaviour of knowledge workers – the
Blackboard website can be looked at, for example, by a chair of department to
ensure that an individual faculty member is conforming to expectations around
norms of ‘good teaching practice’.

>> THE FALLACY OF ‘BEST PRACTICE’ KNOWLEDGE

In the section above we considered the rhetoric of Enterprise Systems as carriers
of ‘best practice’ knowledge. In this section we look at the limitations of this
view. These limitations relate to:
1. the ways users enact (rather than simply adopt) technologies;
2. the myth that ‘best practice’ can be defined independently of the specific
context;
3. the restrictions on flexibility and;
4. the creation of competitive value.
Taking each in turn, first, research has shown that individuals often find ways
to work around the restrictions imposed by Enterprise Systems (or indeed other
types of standardizing KMS). As we discussed in Chapter 3, users enact a tech-
nology, they do not simply adopt it. For example, sales people often maintain
their legacy Excel spreadsheets to organize their customer leads and only input
into the Enterprise System information that they want their boss or their col-
leagues to know about. For example, they may not record every sales contact (as
the system says they should) because they do not want to share potential sales
opportunities with colleagues. Similarly medical doctors maintain paper records

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