Transforming and Computerizing Professional Artifacts. An underestimated opportunity for learning.

Improving the artefacts a knowledge worker uses and how he or she exercises his or her knowledge is a desire that is part of being professional, especially since we are supposed to live in a knowledge society. In the knowledge society there is a continuous structuring and re-structuring, construction and re-construction and learning and re-learning going on due to implementing new information and communication technology. But many of these so called IT-projects fail, especially within health care in spite of management spending huge amounts of money on them. This paper focuses on and wants to create an awareness of how an artefact such as a new knowledge management system becomes a driving force behind expanding the knowledge of an anesthesist and has implications for continuous learning among a group of employees at the anesthesia and intensive care clinic. Implementing new technology is an underestimated opportunity for learning. More importantly, this paper also suggests that a significant educational effort is taking place in society channelled through many these IT-projects, even when they fail.