“The one inhibition I felt using AnswerGarden [was] knowing that the experts were typically busy and workingon projects more important than my little application programs....

about a thirdof the users reported problems with the specificity of the material (eithertoo high or too low) and the level of the explanation provided by the expert(either too high or too low)

ix users were “heavy” users, accounting for 61% of the totalsessions. Heavy users often kept Answer Garden running in an iconifiedstate between uses. One heavy user reported:

216

3.2 Related Systems

Each user and each expert has incentives to work separately toward theconstruction of such a Garden. The users get to find answers, and expertscan rid themselves of commonly asked questions.

Several important considerations behind Answer Garden include:

The directed acyclicgraph of diagnostic questions is projected into a tree to ease navigation forthe user.

ngineerschose not to go to the channel of the highest quality for technical informa-tion, but rather to go to the channel of highest accessibility (i.e., lowestpsychological cost). Allen [1977] argued that the psychological cost was inthe potential lack of reciprocity between giving and obtaining informationand in the status implications of admitting ignorance.

information technology can support organizational memory in twoways, either by making recorded knowledge retrievable or by makingindividuals with knowledge accessible

n other words, wewant to minimize the upstream costs of an organizational memory mecha-nism and make the downstream payoffs clear

This article presents findings from a field study of an organizationalmemory system, the Answer Garden. In short, the study found thataugmenting organizational memory was possible, but it also uncovered anumber of interesting issues and problematic design assumptions. Thisarticle describes these as the basis for future work on organizational andgroup memories.

Our argument issimply that for working, learning, and innovating to thrive collectively depends onlinking these three, in theory and in practice, more closely, more realistically, andmore reflectively than is generally the case at present.

Out of this friction of competing ideas can comethe sort of improvisational sparks necessary for igniting organizational innovation.Thus large organizations, reflectively structured, are perhaps particularly well posi-tioned to be highly innovative and to deal with discontinuitie

Reliance on formal descriptions of work, explicit syllabuses for learning about it,and canonical groups to carry it out immediately set organizations at a disadvantage.This approach, as we have noted, can simply blind management to the practices andcommunities that actually make things happ

(Note, by contrast, how much of the literature refers to the design orcreation of new groups (e.g. Goodman and Associates 1988). From our viewpoint, thecentral questions more involve the detection and support of emergent or existingcommunities.

Whatis learned is profoundly connected to the conditions in which it is learned

The inadequacies of this corporation's directive approach actually make a rep'swork more difficult to accomplish and thus perversely demands more, not fewer,improvisational skill

His work provides a "thick" (see Geertz 1973),detailed description of the way work actually progresses

41

precepts

he ways people actuallywork usually differ fundamentally from the ways organizations describe that work in manuals,training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions.

JOHN SEELY BROWN

Allow me to tag books instead of placing them into static lists (think clusters or tag clouds).

referential processing