Lowering Knowledge Boundaries Through Collaboration Technology : A Problem Identification

Within communities knowledge is shared regularly. Although today’s communities can rely on sophisticated collaboration technologies, the sharing of knowledge remains impeded by different social mechanisms. Removing impediments that originate from different understandings between knowledge exchanging individuals has been called boundary management by Carlile. Boundary management can be supported by the use of specific objects. We investigate collaboration technology as shared object within an organizational knowledge community. In this sense, collaboration technology is conceived as a means to support the spanning of knowledge boundaries. This research-in-progress proposes a design science research (DSR) approach. It aims for designing and evaluating IT-based shared objects which effectively lower boundaries of knowledge sharing. First empirical findings suggest that a collaboration technology that offers a shared space for communication and exchange can provide fruitful support in contexts where syntactic and semantic boundaries prevail. Hence, the design task for CT as shared object in organizational knowledge communities should focus on lowering syntactic and semantic knowledge boundaries