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68 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

Given these issues, it is often only when project completion is imminent and
the reality of new work practices becomes apparent, that users begin to evalu-
ate the new system more closely and raise concerns about how the system has
been configured and/or customized. This often leads to resistance and the need
for post-implementation modifications. Effective resistance may be even more
likely where technologies are aimed at knowledge workers because these kinds of
workers usually have more power than other kinds of workers. Therefore, instead
of emphasizing user participation during the pre-implementation phase it can be
very helpful to view technological innovation as an iterative process involving
interactive episodes of design, implementation and use. These episodes, and the
nature of the innovation process as a whole, are explored further in Chapter 9.
Today, methodologies like rapid prototyping can be used as part of this iterative
process, where rather than trying to design the finished system, engineers get out
a ‘quick-and-dirty’ version and then let users play and react to it. During these
cycles the reality of the new system will certainly become salient and knowledge
workers will inevitably become more interested as they begin to learn from their
situated practice. Most importantly, it is during these iterations that knowledge
workers will really look at what the new system offers and be concerned about
whether it makes their job easier or more difficult. Where the new system is seen
to make their job difficult, as in the case presented at the end of the chapter,
there will be significant user resistance. In other words, trying to achieve consen-
sus before implementation about how the technology will be used appears to be
an unrealistic target. Rather, a more realistic goal may be to provide people with
a system that makes their jobs not significantly more difficult and at the same
time provides them with the prospect that they will be able to do even more in
the future – knowledge workers, as knowledgeable actors, will then themselves
learn to exploit the system as they enact the technology in their daily work.
Once a system is in use, one way of helping knowledge workers understand
its potential is to provide an off-line version where they can ‘play around’ to
identify what happens when they do certain things on the system. This type of
access may be restricted in the live environment because of the repercussions if
they complete transactions in different ways, but in the off-line ‘sandbox’, this
experimentation can help users, including knowledge workers, understand the
potential (and weaknesses) of the system as currently designed.

>> NEW ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS AND KNOWLEDGE
LOSS
One final point to make in this chapter relates to the downsides of the new orga-
nizational forms which can support knowledge work and knowledge workers,
an issue touched upon briefly in Chapter 1. More specifically, while more mod-
ular organizational forms are more conducive to knowledge-intensive work,
paradoxically they also make it more difficult to exploit knowledge across the
stretched organization. In bureaucratic organizations, job descriptions, rules,
procedures and so on were clearly defined and the hierarchy of command pro-

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