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150 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

on their patients but may only record partial information on the EHR system –
the equivalent of an Enterprise Systems in a healthcare setting – either because
they find this easier or because they do not want to record all of the information
for wider consumption (Orlikowski, 2002). This demonstrates one of the limita-
tions of assuming that the adoption of an Enterprise Systems will automatically
embed ‘best practice’ knowledge in an organization.
Second, there is considerable debate and criticism of the very notion of ‘best
practice’ given the very different history and culture of each organization. Cru-
cially, you should be thinking about how the process and practice approaches to
knowledge work, introduced in Chapter 1, would suggest that the very idea that
an Enterprise System embeds knowledge of ‘best practice’ ignores the impor-
tance of context and disregards the processes through which knowledge is nego-
tiated. Thus, Wagner et al. (2006) illustrate that the definition of a ‘best practice’
is a socio-political process of negotiation, rather than an objective reality. In this
sense, implementing an Enterprise System is an organizational change project.
Organizational change, however, is never straightforward, as we saw in Chapter
3. Thus, research has shown that during an Enterprise System implementation
there is often conflict with some end-users resisting the technology (as in the case
in Chapter 3) as they fight over what is ‘best practice’. This is because individu-
als in different locations will carry out ostensibly the same practice (e.g. medical
doctors making a diagnosis) somewhat differently. The introduction of an Enter-
prise System poses constraints on these localized work practices, with the soft-
ware’s integrated design encouraging the institutionalization of one approach to
practice while silencing other ways of working. This is why the introduction of an
Enterprise System to manage knowledge work (and knowledge workers) is often
fraught with difficulties, as individuals and groups (perhaps in different locations
or different departments) fight to get their existing practices imposed as ‘best’
and fight against the standard ‘vanilla’ processes (Wagner and Newell, 2004).
Third, questions have been raised about how, in attempting to manage
knowledge work, Enterprise Systems may restrict the very organizational flexibility
that such work requires, so becoming the ‘legacy’ systems of the future (Galliers,
2006). Thus, it now seems clear that organizations need to be able to differentiate
between what is standard and what is their unique ‘value added’. One estimation
is that around 75 per cent of work processes can be considered standard so that
following ‘best practice’ workflows by instituting the ‘vanilla’ Enterprise Systems
may be most efficient (Davenport, 2000). Nevertheless, even in these ‘standard’
cases (referred to as commodity processes) it may be possible to use knowledge
of what will create added value for a customer to differentiate the process and
provide some competitive edge to knowledge work (Huang et al., 2007). For
example, wake-up calls in hotels today rely on a fairly standard technology –
everything is automated and hotel staff do not usually make the wake-up calls in
person. However, some hotels have slightly modified this technology to influence
greater customer satisfaction. Thus, some hotels in Disneyland now allow guests
to select which Disney character will wake them up in the morning! Customizing
some commodity processes may, therefore, be useful.

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