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Conceptualization and appropriation: the evolving use of a collaborative knowledge management system

Published: 20 August 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Zephyr is an expanding software company that developed a knowledge management system designed to support the work of employees and provide management overview. Despite strong management support the system was not much used and instead employees themselves developed a competing and much used parasitic system. First, we argue that the failure of the management's system is caused by the concept of knowledge upon which the system was built. Hence, design of computer systems is as much a question of critical conceptual understanding of its application domain as a question of doing ethnography and system development. Second, we argue that the process of design extends far into the process of use and that much can be learned by looking at the process of appropriation of a new system. The problems of conceptualisation and appropriation point towards the need to critically examine the mangle of practice in which artefacts, actors and organizations intertwine.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
CC '05: Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility
August 2005
218 pages
ISBN:1595932038
DOI:10.1145/1094562
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 20 August 2005

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Author Tags

  1. appropriation
  2. conceptualisation
  3. design
  4. knowledge management
  5. participatory design
  6. system development
  7. tailorability
  8. user involvement

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