Exploring Support for Knowledge Management in Mobile Work

This paper reports fieldwork from the electrical utilities industry, examining the suitability of current knowledge management perspectives to the day-to-day work of mobile staff, and outlines an initial sketch of a framework for "practical knowledge management".

Abstract

This paper reports fieldwork from the electrical utilities industry, examining the suitability of current knowledge management perspectives to the day-to-day work of mobile staff. Reporting the results of the empirical study, we make a distinction between four aspects of local and mobile "knowledge management" as it took place in the mobile work setting: sharing, i.e., several parties exchange knowledge; indexing, i.e., one party explains to another what knowledge to retrieve; diagnosing, i.e., two parties make sense of how to interpret a situation, and; foreseeing, i.e., one party (or more) uses knowledge to project the future. We compare and contrast the empirical findings with current knowledge management perspectives, and outline an initial sketch of a framework for "practical knowledge management."