IT-based knowledge management to support organizational learning: visa application screening at the INS

This paper explores the tensions between analyzing IT-related change requirements to support knowledge-as-thing versus knowledge-as-process. We explore these tensions in the high-risk decision-making environment of an Immigration and Naturalization Service agency. The study combines competitive intelligence risk-analysis methods with an ethnographic analysis of knowledge-flows, to determine how the roles of human decision-makers may be supported effectively by ICT-based knowledge support. Our findings demonstrate how high-risk decision-making may be analyzed as a integrated hybrid human/ICT intelligence system. The study exposes detailed mechanisms by which knowledge of different forms is transferred, exposing failures in training, interpersonal communications, ICT system support, ad reward structures. We identified four roles for ICT support, to supplement human intelligence effectively in this hybrid system. Four stages of analysis are suggested by the hybrid intelligence framework: (i) risk-category identification, (ii) the application of risk-categories to decision-cases, (iii) testing and adapting categorizations against global conditions, and (iv) transfer of locally-meaningful categorizations of risk across communities of practice. The contributions of this paper are to provide a knowledge taxonomy for such analysis and to suggest a framework by which roles for ICT support in complex and distributed, high-risk decision-making environments may be explored.