“Made with Knowledge”

Disentangling the IT Knowledge Artifact by a Qualitative Literature Review

Federico Cabitza and Angela Locoro

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca,

Viale Sarca 336 20126, Milano, Italy

Keywords: Knowledge Artifact, IT Artifact, Organizational Knowledge, Literature Review.

Abstract: Knowledge Artifact (KA) is an analytical construct by which analysts, researchers and designers from

different disciplines usually denote those material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use,

sharing and representation of knowledge. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing literature by providing

a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the heterogeneous contributions on this concept in the

specialist literature. From our survey of the main contributions to the definition of this concept, we outline a

spectrum of stances laying between two theoretical extremes: we denote one pole “representational”, as it is

grounded on the idea that knowledge can be an “object per se”; and the other pole “socially situated”, as it

builds on the viewpoint seeing knowledge as a social practice, that is an epiphenomenon of a situated,

context-dependent and performative interaction of human actors through and with “objects of knowing”. In

proposing a unifying model to gather complementary dimensions of knowledge together, our aim is to shed

light on the multiple ways these ideas can inform the “reification” of knowledge into particular IT artifacts,

which we call IT Knowledge Artifact (ITKA), and on how seemingly irreconcilable positions can contribute

in the design of these computational artifact supporting knowledge work in organizations.

1 INTRODUCTION

“IT artifact” is a general expression to denote “the

application of IT to enable or support some task(s)

embedded within a structure(s) that itself is

embedded within a context(s).” (Benbasat and

Zmud, 2003). Convincingly introduced in the

Information Systems literature almost 15 years ago

by Orlikowski & Iacono, such a concept has been

addressed by hundreds of scholars in this time lapse

from different and complementary perspectives

(Akhlaghpour et al., 2013) and endowed with

several definitions (Alter, 2006) to account for the

multiple manifestations and proteiform nature of

software applications in organizational settings.

Notwithstanding this apparent scholarly variety,

recent contributions are converging towards a

stronger recognition of the importance of both the

semiotic and social nature of the IT artifact (Lee et

al., 2013), as this is never “natural, neutral,

universal, or given [but it is rather] socially created,

[…] shaped by the interests, values, and assumptions

of a wide variety of communities of developers,

investors, users, […] embedded in […] a social

contexts [that let][…] emerge [them] from ongoing

social practices, […][and] not static and

unchanging, but in a continual evolution.”

(Goldkuhl, 2013). In particular, it has also been

recently claimed that taking the socio-technical

nature of the IT artifact seriously (Markus and

Mentzel, 2014; Harrison et al., 2007) is essential to

promote “ethical responsibility [and] to minimize

the negative consequences of information and

communication technologies”. In this paper, we

focus on Socio-technical IT artifacts that support

knowledge, as a valuable subset of the more genera

concept discussed above, and hence on the notion of

IT Knowledge Artifact (ITKA in what follows). In

(Cabitza et al., 2014) this class of software

applications has been proposed to encompass

“material [IT] artifacts [which are] either designed

or purposely used to enable and support knowledge-

related processes within a community, […], like idea

expression and exchange, content and structure

negotiation, meaning reconciliation, collective

deliberation, new product and process co-design,

knowledge representation at various degrees of

Cabitza F. and Locoro A..

“Made with Knowledge” - Disentangling the IT Knowledge Artifact by a Qualitative Literature Review.

DOI: 10.5220/0005086100640075

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2014), pages 64-75

ISBN: 978-989-758-050-5

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

(under)specification, problem framing and solving,

mutual learning, and novice training”.

Tackling this matter from a socio-technical

perspective requires focusing on those IT artifacts

that create and circulate new information within

human practices, often on the basis of computational

rules that in some way mirror domain-specific

knowledge, as well as on those artifacts that enable

and support knowledge-intensive activities and tasks

both at human (i.e., cognitive) level and at social

(i.e., community) level. A first step in this direction

is to focus on the different aspects of computational

support to knowledge practices, as emerging from

different research strands and scholarly works

articulated around the concept of Knowledge

Artifact (KA in what follows).

We believe it is time to denote these particular

ITKAs in more precise and specific terms (starting

from the work of Cabitza, 2013), in order to fill a

gap in the literature on them where, to the best of

our knowledge, a review drawing on affinities and

divergences in the use of the term KA is still

missing.

The purpose of this work is then to conduct a

qualitative review that would help answer some

main research questions like: “what do we talk about

when we talk about knowledge” as in (Davenport

and Prusak, 2000) in the IT discourse? What are the

underlying assumptions in the design of ITKAs?

How these assumptions affect the design of these

artifacts and, consequently, their low or high

adoption and effective use by their intended users?

The phrase mentioned in the title of this

contribution epitomizes in an intentionally

ambiguous manner the two extremes of whole

spectrum of possible answers that can be given to

the questions above mentioned; a bipole where

ITKAs can be seen as either “made of knowledge”

(Salazar-Torres et al., 2008) or “made in virtue of

knowledge” (Brown and Duguid, 2001). On one

pole, we can recognize the tenets of the Knowledge

Representation (KR) field, which assumes a realistic

perspective on knowledge, i.e., a relation between

the objects conceived in the mind and the apparently

immutable outside forms perceived as reality. KR

expresses the concrete possibility to represent things,

in order to capture their essence for sharing a

discourse with others. This pole roots in Artificial

Intelligence and is based on some principles (Sowa,

2000) that inform the design of ITKAs as KR

devices: this includes models of real objects

according to a formal theory that elucidate their

nature, their relations, and their instances.

Knowledge, in this sense, should represent the

reached consensus by a community on a description

of a piece of reality, being that a domain of

discourse, an application, a task, and so on, which

has been disambiguated, automated and embedded

in a system for managing knowledge.

On the other pole, a complementary mode of

knowledge, or better yet of “knowing”, draws on the

distinction between the procedural “know how” and

the discursive “know that” (Collins and Evans,

2008), but also on a dimension of interpretation,

where “an individual pre-understanding is a result of

experience within a tradition” (Winograd and Flores,

1987, p. 74). This knowledge disposition is a part of

a process that is “neither subjective nor objective”

(Winograd and Flores, 1987, p. 75) and has

biological roots (Maturana and Varela, 1992): it

emerges from patterns of interaction that couple

living organisms with their internal structures and

external environments, and orient their actions and

changes “in many dimensions at the same time” (p.

116). (Greenhalgh and Wieringa, 2011) grasp such

interplay of knowledge with the word “mindlines”,

that is “internalized guidelines”; in other words, the

capacity of “continually being adjusted partly by

grazing on written sources […][and] mainly by

reflecting on experience during discussion with

colleagues and opinion leaders, […][especially when

they share] real stories of how they managed real

cases” (p. 506).

The main contribution of our work is the

proposal of a conceptual framework of key values

and attributes for the analysis of the rationales and

design principles at stake around the concept of

(IT)KA (that is simply the computational

counterpart of a KA), according to the results of an

extensive qualitative review. The outcome of this

analysis helped us conceive two main categories of

ITKAs: the “Representational ITKA” and the

“Socially situated ITKA”. In general, this

categorization could be a tool for the analyst and

designer to interpret the peculiarities of the setting

hosting ITKAs, as well as to understand the ways

and goals according to which ITKAs are built and

used. In addition, this analysis could be a first

contribution to unravel implicit values and

assumptions for ITKAs design.

The paper is structured as follows: after a brief

introduction to the method adopted for our

qualitative review, we show the results of the

different phases of our analysis, discuss them by also

providing examples of design, and conclude.

"MadewithKnowledge"-DisentanglingtheITKnowledgeArtifactbyaQualitativeLiteratureReview

2 METHOD, CATEGORIES AND

DIMENSIONS OF ANALYSIS

2.1 Search and Selection

Our review of the literature on ITKAs relies on the

works of (Webster and Watson, 2002), and

(Wolfswinkel et al., 2011). We strictly adhere to all

the phases listed and described in the last paper,

whose analysis phase corresponds to grounded

theory methodology. The search and selection

phases are depicted in Figure 1. In particular, for the

retrieval of relevant articles on KAs the Google

Scholar engine was queried in Summer 2013, with

the following keywords: “Knowledge Art*fact*

is|are|(can be)”, for the first round of searches. The

top ranked articles with their abstract were

examined, and we proceeded with a selection of the

part of them that resulted within the scope of the

review as formulated in the introduction. This

resulted in a final selection of 21 sources, each

containing a definition of KA, and part of which

were used in our design Section. A second and a

third query were issued with the term: “knowledge

representation”, and “ontology design”, respectively,

in order to refine the branch of the KAs literature on

the representational side. A total of 40 papers were

selected, and 3 papers were kept as paradigmatic of

KAs real applications. A fourth query with the term:

“epistemic object” was finally issued in order to

refine the branch of the KAs literature on the

situativity side. A total of 3 papers were selected and

used as above. A final round of queries were issued

in the AIS eLibrary for finding selected theoretical,

primary study, and review articles based on the

criteria of having being published as a journal article

(e.g. MIS Quarterly Executive) or conference

proceedings (e.g. ICIS and ECIS) of the AIS

community. After a thorough analysis and re-read of

excerpts, a final bunch of 15 articles was finally

selected and exploited for the creation of our

conceptual model on KAs. This selected literature

spans at the intersection of theoretical approaches to

organizational knowledge (Burrell and Morgan,

1994), sociological and information systems studies

on IT conceptualization (de Vaujany, 2005; Iivari et

al., 1998; Iivari, 2007; Orlikowski and Iacono,

2001), as well as Knowledge Management Systems

reviews and Organizational Knowledge resources

studies (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001; Alavi and

Leidner, 2001, Binney, 2001, Rodríguez-Elias et al.,

2008).

2.2 Analysis and Presentation

The open coding phase was conducted on either the

21 papers containing definitions of KAs (see Table 1

for a detail of sources and definitions), and the 15

theoretical papers on IT artifact and Knowledge

Management conceptualizations; the axial coding

phase was conducted by extracting conceptual

dimensions from the 15 theoretical papers (the

findings of the articles were put in an output table, as

in Webster et al. 2002, with the categories of the

research conceptualization as concepts. Each article

could span more than one concept and attribute. See

Table 2), and by classifying the 21 papers on KAs

definitions and the 10 real case applications papers

according to them (see the descriptive analysis of

Sections 3.1 and 3.2); the selection coding phase

lead to a further synthesis of our findings into the

two main categories of KAs classification, and was

based on all the papers collected (see Figure 2 for a

summary of our findings).

2.2.1 Open Coding: Ka Definitions

Table 1 reports the 21 definitions of KA and can be

ideally split in two quite equal parts. The first part

refers to a definition of KA where knowledge is

conceived as being a part of res extensa, to look

through this definitorial phenomenon from a

Cartesian perspective. The second part of definitions

puts more emphasis on the communicative aspects

of individual activities, whose collectively shared

and interpretable output is the piece of knowledge

(here conceived as a part of res cogitans) that can be

supported by KAs. This ontological distinction

brings important consequences in the way KAs are

designed for the aims and scope that they should

support, with their different forms and within

different environments.

2.2.2 Axial Coding: Categories and

Dimensions of Knowledge Artifacts

and IT Design

The two dimensions of objectivity and situativity

(our input dimensions for classifying ITKA-based

applications, see Section 2.2.3) characterize the

categories of our output map, depicted in Table 2,

where a bipolar conceptualization of the literature on

KAs has been conceived. This table is a

classificatory device for our review activity. The

dimensions described are ideally split in two parts.

KMIS2014-InternationalConferenceonKnowledgeManagementandInformationSharing

Figure 1: Search and Selection steps.

The first part is theoretical and stems from the

framework of Burell & Morgan, within

organizational studies. We enrich the ontological

dimension of knowledge with other perspectives:

that of Nonaka & Takeuchi talking of explicit and

implicit knowledge; that of Sowa indicating the way

knowledge is representable; that of Duguid

highlighting the cultural side of knowledge,

especially in Communities of Practice.

Besides Burrell and Morgan epistemology, we

have preferred to contrast the term “positivist” with

a set of terms that should better characterize the

“non-positivist” stance. To this aim, we especially

highlighted a historical that sees users and systems

as an evolution towards “interactive agents” from

passive ones. This, in our view, better expresses the

epistemology of the “Socially situated KA”

perspective.

The “knowledge modes and structures” are those

of Alavi & Leidner, Iivari and de Vaujany.

Rodríguez-Elias et al. and spans from the more

“unstructured” (as in audio, video and free text) to

the more “structured” (as in metadata, formal

categories and graphics).

The second part of Table 2 focuses on the

application of the first part principles to IT artifacts

design and requirements. Orlikowski & Iacono and

Iivari gave a classification of IT artifacts and of IT

applications archetypes, respectively. We related and

decided to group them under a unique perspective.

Alavi & Leidner gave a taxonomy of which

kinds of knowledge is processable by KMS, and

Holslappe & Joshi extracted some attributes of

organizational knowledge resources. We selected

from both the more salient for our conceptualization.

We added Massey & Montoya-Weiss’

conceptualization of time, and Iivary’s IS

development approaches classification, as well as

March & Smith’s evaluation dimension in IT. A

final dimension is that of KM Applications by

Binney, as a frame into which we could exemplify

how the issues of passing from representational

knowledge to socially situated knowledge may also

fit into the given “KM landscapes”.

2.2.3 Selective Coding: Objectivity Vs

Situativity

The two categorical dimensions of objectivity and

situativity, together with their relationships with

different kind of IT applications, are reported in

Figure 2.

Situativity, for our purposes, can be epitomized

in terms of the extent the KA is capable to adapt

itself to the context and situation at hand, as well as

the extent it can be appropriated by its users and

exploited in a given situation. Objectivity, to our

aims, can be conversely considered the capability of

the KA to represent true facts in an objective, crisp,

and context-independent manner, as well as the

extent it can be transferred among its users as an

object carrying some knowledge with itself. To

adopt evocative terms introduced by (Goguen, 1992)

and (Latour, 1987), then objectivity refers to the

extent a KA is “cold / immutable” (cf. Latour) and

“dry” (cf. Goguen), while situativity refers to the

extent such an object is “warm / mutable”, and

“wet”, respectively.

Each group of applications of Figure 2 is

associated with the research and design principles,

values and assumptions of the disciplines that lay at

the intersection points of the Figure. This schema

"MadewithKnowledge"-DisentanglingtheITKnowledgeArtifactbyaQualitativeLiteratureReview

wants to express how much objectivity and

situativity is implied by each design input and

requirement for the IT artifact as the final output.

Besides the two extremes, no other group of

applications contains purely objectivity or

situativity, but the most part of them result in a

differently mixed blend of the two.

Depending on the attributes collected in our axial

coding analysis (the dimensions depicted in the

second part of Table 2), we can give a brief

overview of what objectivity and situativity mean in

terms of the knowledge phases, structures, attributes,

and knowledge-based activities that these

applications and tools are supporting, while

delegating a detailed description of some aspects of

their design to the next Section.

Objectivity seems to characterize more all those

large-scale applications that are oriented to business

and enterprise activities, where the dimensions of

organizations require to handle information

quantitatively, and in a centralized way (e.g. by

collecting all the specialized knowledge distributed

among the different sectors of an organization and

by adopting a uniform and top-down codification).

The aim of such applications is to collect, store,

retrieve, and apply information across the lens of

standard procedures that guarantee the control of a

complex system and the rapid problem solving and

decision making at a “routine” level, as well as at a

managerial level.

Information systems technology lays in the

middle, is scalable, and constitutes the set of tools

able to process and manage information (i.e. to

structure, store and maintain the documents by

indexing, organizing, classifying, filtering it, and so

on).

Computer Supported Cooperative Learning and

Computer Supported Cooperative Work

technologies support a more individual and personal

dimension in the management of the knowledge that

they are called to handle. In a way, the environments

of such applications are less standardised, not totally

specified, and strongly oriented to creation, design,

innovation, apprenticeship, creative working and

management, and unstructured communication and

cooperation tasks (often outside and between

organizations).

In what follows, a necessarily brief review of

some literature on ITKAs is reported, as selected and

framed along our conceptual categorization and

analysis.

3 DISENTANGLING ASPECTS OF

ITKA DESIGN

3.1 The Representational ITKAS

Representational ITKA are objects where knowledge

is reduced to a formal logic way that aims to capture

their “essence” (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001; 2002).

In this tradition, KA may have varying degree of

structuredness e.g.,(Giunchiglia and Chenu-Abente,

2009), from documents, diagrams, manuals, to

formal ontologies and knowledge bases, passing

through the whole range of semi structured sources

that are used in organizational settings, like

spreadsheets, forms, XML documents, and the like

(Toro and Kulkarni, 2008; Diaz and Canals, 2007).

In addition, in this stance KA can be endowed

with a varying degree of generativity, from simple

proof checkers to even very complex inference

engines. Ontologies (Guarino, 1998), for example,

are the representational objects that epitomize

knowledge structure and computation over it.

The ontological spectrum (Noy and Hafner,

1997) includes the so called lightweight ontologies,

i.e., simple vocabularies of hierarchical terms, which

mainly serve to classify items; lexical resources

(Fellbaum, 1998), which makes explicit and

expandable the local space of word meanings, for

advanced search and retrieval tasks; fully

axiomatized theories, all encoded in logic languages

(Baader, 2003) and equipped with reasoning tools.

As the computational complexity tends to

increase rapidly, more than often the model of

reality that undergoes the conceptualization and

axiomatization process tends to be partial and

oversimplified (Sowa, 2000).

According to the above definitions,

representational KA are those stored in a Knowledge

Management repository (Weber et al., 2006), in a

Digital Library (Candela et al., 2008), and the like,

as structured sources of static knowledge, as well as

in more sophisticated tools that computationally

“activate” knowledge, like Decision Support System

or Expert Systems (Matook and Brown, 2008), or

any semantically enriched IT System, with its

automatic or semi-automatic services for structuring,

storing, extracting, retrieving, evaluating, and

maintaining knowledge artifacts e.g.,(Maedche et

al., 2003).

KMIS2014-InternationalConferenceonKnowledgeManagementandInformationSharing

Table 1: KA: 21 definitions. Italics in definitions is ours.

Author KA definition

Paavola et al. (2004) Knowledge creation activities rely heavily on the use, manipulation and evolution

of shared KAs externalizing a body of (tacit or explicit) knowledge

Smith (2000) any item that captures explicit or tacit knowledge

Ancori (2000) something where knowledge is made “explicit” and “recorded”, as the formal

outcome of a process of codification

Seiner (2001) defined piece of recorded knowledge that exists in a format that can be retrieved to

be used by others

Diaz & Canals (2007) minimal unit of explicit and exchangeable knowledge

something that encapsulates knowledge [that can be] informal (where knowledge is

strong hard-coded), semi-formal (where informal knowledge representation is

mixed with formal representation), or formal (where knowledge is represented by a

formal knowledge representation system)

Krupansky (2006) an artefact which represents an encoding of knowledge

S. Gandhi (2004) When knowledge is fixed or codified, a KA is created, and it is this knowledge

artifact that can be managed.

Holsapple & Joshi (2001) object that convey or hold usable representations of knowledge

Holsapple & Joshi (2002) object that represents knowledge

Weber et al. (2006) whatever element stored in a KM repository

Weber & Gunawardena (2008) a knowledge engineering formalism of knowledge representation […] that allows a

computational system to make decisions and solve problems

Alavi & Leidner (2001) must include the minimal elements for a user to make a decision to solve a

problem, and be easily interpretable

Salazar-Torres et al. (2008) vehicle for knowledge sharing

artifact made of knowledge. [...] can be very useful to ensure the effectiveness of

the transfer and utilization of knowledge in organizations of all sorts.

Mödritscher & Hoffmann (2007) any piece of (digital) information relevant for a certain working context and

enriched with semantic information in terms of metadata

Mangisengi & Essmayr (2002) anything that allows knowledge to be communicated independently of its holder

Scrivener (2002) artefact designed with the intention of communicating knowledge

Mansingh et al. (2009) input to and product of knowledge enabled activities

Giunchiglia & Chenu-Abente

(2009)

object created as a result of an activity which encodes knowledge, the

understanding or awareness gained beyond data

Bereiter (2002) products or objects of thinking and reasoning that can be collectively argued

Oinas-Kukkonen (2004) serve as a collaboration vehicle through interaction between information

producers and consumers, within a team of co-workers or among other

stakeholders [and] support understanding and communication in the individual

learning of new things

Y. Tzitzikas et al. (2007) KA refer to what is being created and/or shared by a group of learners (and could

be a set of words, documents, concept maps, ontologies, annotations, etc).

"MadewithKnowledge"-DisentanglingtheITKnowledgeArtifactbyaQualitativeLiteratureReview

Table 2. Conceptual Framework of Organizational KM and ITKAs Design.

Attributes underlying assumptions for Design Representational ITKA Socially situated ITKA

Paradigms of study

[Burrell & Morgan 1994]

Functionalist Interpretive

Ontology (nature of knowledge)

[Sowa 2000; Duguid 2005; Burrell & Morgan

1994; Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995]

explicit / representable

(realism)

tacit / cultural / practical

/actionable (nominalism)

Epistemology (interpretation of knowledge)

[Burrell & Morgan 1994; de Vaujany 2005;

Greenhalgh & Wieringa 2011]

positivist (nomothetic) constructivist / interactionist

/emergentist (ideographic)

IS approaches to IT conceptualizations (status of

knowledge)

[de Vaujany 2005]

autonomous

passive

(deterministic)

integrative (action and

structure cannot be separated)

malleable

actively and interactively

usable (voluntaristic)

Modes and structures of knowledge

[Iivari 2007; de Vaujany 2005; Alavi & Leidner

2001; Duguid 2005, Rodríguez-Elias et al. 2008]

Explicit structuredl

codifiable

descriptive

procedural

objective

essential

formal

rational / conceptual

Explicit unstructured

interpreted

socially constructed

instrumental

performed

comprehensive

subjective

flexible / conventional

IT artifact archetypes (scope and aim of

knowledge)

[Iivari 2007]

To informate / to automate To mediate / to augment

IT artifact views (activities based on knowledge)

[Orlikowski & Iacono 2001]

Computational (algorithm,

model), labor substitution,

production and information

processing tool

Social relation tool

proxy / ensemble view

Knowledge Management views (phases of

knowledge)

[Alavi & Leidner 2001]

factual

data oriented

object to be stored and

manipulated

condition of access to

information

personalized information

state of knowing and

understanding

process of applying expertise

potential to influence action

Attributes of knowledge in Organizational

knowledge resources

[Iivari et al 1998; Holsapple & Joshi 2001; Massey

& Montoya-Weiss 2006; March & Smith 1995]

Quality: validity

Main view: objective

Time: discrete, ordered,

dependent

Level of certainty/detail:

decidable / specified

Usage: computational /

procedural / top-down oriented

Quality: utility (means-end

oriented)

Main view: subjective

Time: continuous, chaotic,

independent

Level of certainty/detail:

undecidable / left incomplete

Usage: pragmatic / situational /

bottom-up oriented

Knowledge Management Applications

[Binney 2001]

Transactional

Analytical

Asset

Process

Developmental

Innovation and creation

KMIS2014-InternationalConferenceonKnowledgeManagementandInformationSharing

Figure 2: Selective Coding: classification of ITKA-based applications grouped by research discipline and according to the

two dimensions of objectivity and situativity.

In a representational approach, some suggestions

on how to couple formalisms with design

requirements for a better use of KAs are devised

(Szulanski, 1996). (Weber and Gunawardena, 2008)

also recognize that “the design of knowledge

artifacts includes the processes where they are

applicable”. KAs for enhancing and supporting

highly specialized tasks in communities of experts

are those depicted in (Bandini and Manzoni, 2002;

Bandini et al., 2003, Salazar-Torres et al., 2008),

where formal knowledge is collected with keeping in

mind, and applying, principles and methodologies

that involve instances, practices, and values of

specific communities and of their past knowledge. In

particular, the KA conceived in this project is a case-

based reasoning KA, in that it supports innovation

management activities by incorporating the jargon of

the technical experts for recording past experiences.

A case-based reasoning mechanism for problem

solving is then provided to facilitate collaboration

within members of other teams.

The computational part is based on the explicit

semantics added to the rather implicit system of

meanings of language symbols, to provide a flexible

layer of negotiation that can adhere to the new case

that needs to be collaboratively examined based on

the past ones. New combinations of the elements

represented in the KA memory support are obtained

by exploiting fuzzy logic rules as computational

counterpart of the qualitative variables of the

specific domain and case at hand.

3.2 The Socially Situated ITKAS

Practice oriented definitions refer to something that

is made during a performance, in “knowing” (Cook

and Brown, 1999), seen as a “social product

[emerging from the] messy, contingent, and situated

outcome or group activity.” (Turnbull, 2000).

In this context, KAs are not supposed to store

knowledge or to be designed to “engender knowing”

(Scrivener, 2002). Better yet, a KA allows its users

to make apt and proper decisions or create

innovation, or solve problems, and overcome

breakdowns. In this stance, it acts as a support or

scaffold to the expression of knowledgeable

behaviors. In complex organizational settings, KAs

regards also how to organize memories, report best

practices, outline ideal and effective methods

(Cabitza and Simone, 2012), because such

representations (either textual, diagrammatic or

pictorial) trigger opportunities for socialization,

"MadewithKnowledge"-DisentanglingtheITKnowledgeArtifactbyaQualitativeLiteratureReview

internalization and, by evocation and memory aid,

knowledge retention and exploitation (i.e.,

knowledgeable behavior). As “centers of gravity for

knowledge [KAs] concentrate it, make it tangible,

instrumental, effective” (Allen, 2004, p. 62).

(Knorr-Cetina, 1999; 2001) introduced the

concepts of “performing-with” and “being-in-

relation-with” to distinguish the relation with

“epistemic objects”, the classical objects of study in

scientific practice, which implies a relational attitude

more than a performative one. These objects are

“capable of unfold indefinitely” although

“instantiated”, as they are “simultaneously

mutating” (cf. (Suchman, 2007), on the situated

actions in the context of “heterogeneously enacted

and intrinsically indefinite events”). An “unfolding

ontology” suitable for describing them should be

based on post-scriptive structures, which may

include the “temporality” of things into which

“epistemic objects […] tend to [constantly point to a

possibly] unreachable real whole”.

(Ewenstein and Whyte, 2007) extended this

notion to visual forms, through which both designers

and engineers should cooperate on a common

ground. Visual forms are mutable forms that unfold

“in time”, as “they are not yet but might become in

future iterations”; “in space, as standpoint-specific

boundary objects”. For their boundariness they are

defined “trans-epistemic objects”, i.e. “capable of

traversing and permeating different epistemologies

of design”.

(Massey and Montoya-Weiss, 2006) investigate

the process of knowledge conversion (KC), both in

indirect KC (solitary work interacting with the

artifact) and in direct KC (synchronization via

communicative human-to-human activity). They

propose a model of “personal perception of time”,

i.e., a one task or “monophasic” entity vs. a

“polyphasic” entity or structure of events.

What is put in the foreground by these design

studies are the mutable social and temporal

dimensions of knowledge forms, which seem to

suggest inescapable requirements for the design of

KAs.

4 DISCUSSION AND

CONCLUSIONS

The literature review we have outlined above has

shed light on the manifold, and sometimes even

divergent, perspectives that have so far emerged

about the nature of what scholars have wanted to

denote with the term Knowledge Artifact in the last

15 years. Our literature review unveils the

characteristic of the concept of Knowledge Artifact

to be a “boundary concept” (Löwy, 1990), that is

something that allows “disparate proponents to

appropriate it in consonance with the main aims and

scopes of their fields”. However, with our review we

have also aimed to raise awareness of both the

complementarity and tensions existing between

different stances that can be positioned at some point

within the objectivity vs. situativity spectrum. In

short, this categorization is ultimately aimed at

shedding light on the necessary recognition that

designing for effective knowledge artifacts requires

to address once again important questions on what

we want human knowledge to be, and accept as

possible yet temporary answers contributions

coming from the whole symbolic-subsymbolic range

of stances that have been very briefly outlined in this

work.

All in all, one could rightly wonder how the

categories proposed in this conceptual framework

can be reflected in distinct design principles or,

even, more specific requirements. We hint at these

principles here in a very general manner for

limitations of space. A coherently representational

stance will require KAs to be able to: store more or

less structured documents; possibly classify them on

the basis of some domain ontology; and enable their

retrieval according to queries, filters, topic models

and user profiles of varying complexity. The KA

could also be capable of storing usable

representations of declarative (e.g., assertions and

rules) and procedural (e.g., algorithms, process

models) to assist users in knowledge work or give

them support in decision making. An ideal KA is

assessed in terms of the quality of its output

(pertinency, accuracy, completeness, timeliness,

etc.) and of its autonomy in providing such an output

on the basis of the available information (e.g.,

inputs) within acceptable range of deviations from

the gold standards posed with respect to the quality

dimensions mentioned above. This means that the

process leading to the right output should be aware

of the context, including the user, but within the

variability accepted and considered in the

computational model formally. In Figure 2 these

features characterize the upper Cartesian hemiplane

depicted therein, where also the main systems that

are usually more focused on a representational

treatment of knowledge are listed.

On the other hand, the situated perspective would

require to design KAs that do not necessarily

represent knowledge per se, as said above, but that

KMIS2014-InternationalConferenceonKnowledgeManagementandInformationSharing

rather promote knowledge-related processes like

innovation, decision making and learning: in this

latter case the nature of the KA cannot be decoupled,

nor generalized, from the specific setting or

Community of Practice where the KA is supposed to

play its role of knowledge facilitator. The first

studies of communities where the creation and

circulation of new knowledge is part of the practices

that foster sense of belonging and identity therein

led to characterize a specific kind of community,

denoted as “knowing community” (Cabitza et al,

2014), which is defined as the social gathering

around a KA and where actors interact also in virtue

of the KA mediation. To account for this mediating

capability, specific principles have been proposed

for the design of situated KAs, namely,

representational locality, semantic openness, and

flexible underspecification, and discussed in

(Cabitza et al., 2013). Differently from the

representational KA, the quality of the situated KA

cannot be proved formally, but rather assessed in

terms of user adoption, appropriation and

satisfaction towards knowledge work support, that is

in terms of the extent users consider the KA fit to

their needs and capable of triggering social

interactions that would allow them to create,

socialize and diffuse new knowledge. In Figure 2,

we denoted this capability “socio-technical fit” (in

the bottommost hemiplane) as this is certainly an

attribute that a KA does not possess independently

of the social setting in which it is adopted, but rather

something depending on many factors that go

beyond the merely computational and performance-

related aspects of the artifact. As locality is

important for situated KAs (by definition itself of

situation), any strong or strict structure hardwired in

the artifact at design time could undermine, or just

hinder, the processes of user appropriation (Dix,

2007) and evolutionary growth (Mørch, 2003) the

KA must somehow undertake to support a knowing

community over time. For this reason, the capability

of the KA to be adapted, configured, and tinkered by

end users themselves to improve the above

mentioned fit is the second dimension on which

prospective situated KAs can be assessed (see Figure

2, bottommost hemisphere).

Based on the literature review, future research

can address several directions. First, the literature

review highlights the diversity of KAs; we suggested

a typology based on two dimensions, i.e. objectivity

and situativity. However, other proposals and

taxonomies are possible. On a more conceptual

level, our categorization can also be taken as a

contribution for a scholarly debate still to be

developed, regarding what features should a KA

exhibit, and on what kind of priorities to focus on

with respect to the application domain or

community. A major attention to the social practice

aspects of knowledge, for instance, could motivate

the design of artifacts that are made to be local, in

continuous evolution, and to host necessarily

incomplete, and possibly partially inconsistent and

ambiguous representations.

These only seemingly paradoxical features

should not then be taken as deficiencies of the tools

conceived to support knowledge, but rather as

features that result from a deep understanding of the

semiotic nature of human representations (Gourlay,

2004) and that require a committed research agenda

in the next years to come to be fully realized in

running applications and knowledge artifacts.

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