Representing knowledge: instances of management information

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Against the backdrop of discussions about the ‘Information Society’, the ‘Informational Economy’ and the role of IT in realizing organizational change we examine how representations of ‘organizational knowledge’ are constructed and used in work settings. We do this through the explication of ethnographic materials that detail the realization and use of Management Information (MI) in a major UK retail bank undergoing massive organizational change. We focus in particular on explicating how existing metric information was drawn upon to construct a representation of the work of the bank for those involved in managing that work. Systems designers have been increasingly interested in offering ways of conceptualizing the problem of ‘knowledge’ with a view to embedding these properties in systems. In the quest to develop representations of procedural knowledge to support work we argue that it is first necessary to understand how representations are actually created and used in work to support existing work practices.