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156 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

understanding and meaning/belief system. For example, globally distributed
software engineers, with a similar training and understanding, may be able
to work collaboratively without much difficulty and to share information via
a KMS. However, it is extremely difficult for such globally distributed col-
laboration to occur where the individuals have heterogeneous beliefs and
understandings, as in the Research Team case in Chapter 4. Yet, the sharing
of knowledge across functional, organizational and/or national boundaries
is precisely the goal of most KMS initiatives. Paradoxically, then, this means
that attempts to manage knowledge using KMS may actually be most prob-
lematic in the very conditions where the need is greatest – that is, where there
are significant divisions of practice.
Developments in ICT do, however, open up opportunities for knowledge
work and knowledge workers from a practice perspective. In particular, new
material properties of ICT, in particular the development of the so-called Web
2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, can facilitate the types of interaction that support know-
ing in practice. These developments led Time Magazine in 2006 to nominate the
person of the year as ‘You’. This was to celebrate how all kinds of content – news,
entertainment, information of all kinds, reviews and so on – was being created,
not by dedicated corporations who would then transmit this content to passive
recipients, but by everyone using Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 is a term used
to describe the new type of software that allows users themselves to create con-
tent and share directly with each other, whether through social networking sites
like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and LinkedIn, or through wikis and blogs.
The Internet has thus become a tool for collaboration and networking rather
than a repository.
In the context of an organization, McAfee (2006) uses the term ‘Enter-
prise 2.0’ to define these same kinds of technologies, but used within the
firewall of an organization. The key characteristic of these 2.0 technologies,
according to McAfee, is that they not only allow the sharing of documents
(i.e. outputs of knowledge work) but also make visible the practices of knowl-
edge workers and interdependencies between practices (i.e. valuable process
knowledge not just content or product knowledge – see Chapter 4). Thus,
Web 2.0 technologies allow users to observe the processes of knowledge pro-
duction, as well as the output – who adds/deletes/amends something over
time and what they have added/deleted/amended. McAfee suggests that
there are six key features of 2.0 technologies that differentiate them from
traditional ICT:
1. Search – new tools that make it possible to search for information rather than
having to rely on navigation options.
2. Links – dynamic links between content, reflecting how people have actually
moved across pages and sites, make it possible to identify related content,
thus facilitating users in finding useful content.
3. Authoring – blogs (enabling individuals to author content that others can
add to), wikis (enabling groups to author content in an iterative fashion)

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