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70 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

can help organizations ‘manage their knowledge’. In the next chapter we focus
down on the micro-processes that are involved in knowledge creation.

>> CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter we have considered the ways in which advancements in ICTs
are opening up new possibilities for the design of organizations which are more
supportive for knowledge-intensive work. However, we have also seen that
these advancements in ICTs will not automatically or deterministically lead to
the adoption of new organizational forms or new arrangements for organizing,
as is sometimes naively assumed. Rather, the way the new ICTs are used, and
their effectiveness, will depend on complex interactions between technology,
organization, context and users. In relation to knowledge work, we have shown
how ICTs play an important role in shaping, and being shaped by, purposes (e.g.
applications of knowledge to new tasks), knowledge processes (e.g. knowledge
sharing across geographical locations) and enabling contexts (organizational and
institutional). We used the example of teleworking to illustrate this and dis-
cussed how the implementation and use of any kind of ICT involved a process
of negotiation over time. We examine this more closely through a case study
presented next. This case is about a university implementing an ERP system.
We discuss ERP systems in Chapter 7, for now it is sufficient to understand that
ERP is an IT system that stores data in a central database so that all departments
are working from the same data. In order to make this work, all departments
need to define and use data in the same way and follow the same process in
carrying out their work.

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