Abstract
This chapter concerns the interplay between the Information and Communication Technology and the collaboration mechanisms supporting knowledge creation, as investigated within disciplines like Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Human Computer Interaction. The chapter proposes three interrelated ways to characterize the spatial substratum of the firm’s milieu: the physical and the virtual space; its local and the global dimension; and finally the kinds of artifacts that populate this space; then, it discusses the technology as a key element of the milieu by considering information systems and collaboration technologies. The conclusions claim that the technology should be used to manage the complexity of the target reality and not as a means to introduce simplifications for sake of a misinterpreted efficiency at the organizational and technological levels.
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Notes
- 1.
Recall that collaboration is here considered as a basic ingredient of both creativity and innovation.
- 2.
The crash of the Information Systems installed in big organizations has been the object of alive discussions among the ICT experts in Italy in the last couple of years.
- 3.
As in the introductory chapter, also here the notion of place recalls the concept of milieu, although with a different disciplinary background.
- 4.
This notion has been reformulated in many ways, often distorting its original definition and creating alternative names: see (Andriessen, 2005) for a summary of this plethora of proposals. Here we adhere the original definition.
- 5.
Wenger (1998b) mentions the following stages: potential, building, engaged, active and adaptive.
- 6.
It can also be used to “compute” the nature of the networks of companies that are the object of the analysis reported in the contributions of the second part of this book: from loose structures, up to districts, until interorganizational CoPs.
- 7.
We use the term facet instead of the original term dimension to avoid confusion with the local and global dimensions. An alternative connotation of the social capital (Adler & Kwon, 2002) calls the same three dimensions with the terms: opportunity, ability and motivation, that perhaps better explain their meaning.
- 8.
SECI stands for “Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization”. This model has been criticized [see e.g., (Wilson, 2002)] for been too simplistic and unduly prescriptive with respect to the complexity of the learning by individuals. We share in part these criticisms but we believe that they are often based on a biased reading of the sometimes imprecise definition of the proposal.
- 9.
The rich notion of awareness for sake of improving collaboration is thoroughly discussed in (Schmidt, 2002) and in the papers contained in the related special issue.
- 10.
This term has been defined in different and contradictory ways in the literature: for this reason we clarify the one we refer to in order to avoid misinterpretations.
- 11.
Basically, with the same structure but without the contents that were sensible for sake of innovation.
- 12.
- 13.
EU SMEs in 2012: at the crossroads Annual report on small and medium-sized enterprises in the EU, 2011/12.
- 14.
This is what makes tools like spreadsheets killer applications within organizations. Moreover, this need triggered a research line called End User Development (EUD; Lieberman, Paternò, & Wulf, 2006) that proposes different solutions for an effective user involvement in a true “socially embedded technologies” development (Cabitza & Simone, 2015).
- 15.
Nowadays, business processes management is a component of an information system. Here we consider a light version of it, that is the management of processes that are embedded in other collaborative applications and have in general a reduced complexity.
- 16.
Actually, we could also mention the Web 3.0 solutions that endow the former with Semantic Web functionalities, that however show the same criticality mentioned before regarding conceptual modelling, specifically ontologies.
- 17.
A Corporate Social Network is in general a WEB 2.0 application that is implemented on a platform that guarantees secure and constrained access rights compliant with the corporate’s policies.
- 18.
The current technologies could implement the same ideas in an easier way form the technical viewpoint; however the idea is still innovative and poorly supported by general purpose platforms.
- 19.
Typically, the annotation interface contains a cue (a tick icon) to check the annotation and make it disappear as “approved” or as “irrelevant”, by the way without distinguishing between the two opposite meanings.
- 20.
Some available platforms allow one to associate a forum or to add a thread of comments to a resource (e.g., a document): however it is evident that this is a banal reuse of functionalities that have been conceived for other purposes and are quite rigid with respect what is proposed here.
- 21.
The results reported by other sources are in general biased in favour of the success of the initiatives, with little attention to a critical view of their outcomes.
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Simone, C. (2016). The Firm as a Knowledge-Creating Milieu: The Role of the ICT. In: Cusinato, A., Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (eds) Knowledge-creating Milieus in Europe. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45173-7_4
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