GATEKEEPERS, INFORMATION, STARS, AND BOUNDARY SPANNERS
A substantial body of research has been developed on the
transmission of information within organizations, particularly R&D organizations.
The seminal work was that of Thomas J. Allen of MIT [Allen and Cohen, 1969, Allen,T., 1977] who conducted a number of studies
relating to information flow in industrial and corporate R&Dlaboratories. Allen’s most ingenious contribution to the
field was to seize upon the phenomenon that in many cases in the context of military R&D and
procurement, the same contract is awarded to two different organizations to achieve the same end,
typically in the case of a critical component of a larger system. Duplicative development contracts may, in
fact, be very worthwhile insurance against the failure of a key component of a system. This
duplication provided a wonderfully robust context in which to examine information flows and what
distinguished the information flows in the more successful projects from the less successful.
Allen coined the term ‘Gatekeeper’ to describe the information
flow stars that he discovered, the heavily connected nodes in the information flow pattern. The
reason that he chose that ter was that much of the development and project work that he
investigated was classified militar work, where there seemed to be something of a paradox, how was a
team to be successful if it didn’t effectively connect with the world of information outside
the organization? But how did it do that in a classified and communication restricted
environment?What he discovered was that the information stars, the sociometric stars, were the answer to
that paradox; they were the information channels through which external information reached the project
team.That role was so crucial in the contexts that Allen typically investigated what he termed his
sociometric stars “Gatekeepers.” They oversaw and guarded the gates through which external information
reached the projects. Indeed, one might say that they were not just the gatekeepers, they
themselves were the gates.
The terminology is understandable, given that context, but a bit
misleading just the same, and rather too narrow, for the gatekeepers did much more. They were
also the channels for information sharing and exchange within the organization and within the
project. Allen himself, in fact, in developing and explicating the role of gatekeepers introduces
and explains his gatekeepers with the term “sociometric stars.” “Information stars” a term emerging
later [Tushman and Scanlan, 1981a,b], is, however, a more apt description, one that brings to mind more
of the multiple roles and functions that such persons perform.
Allen found that the more productive teams were particularly
characterized by having had more diverse information contacts outside the project team than
did the less productive teams. In particular, he elucidated and illuminated the rich informal
communication networks, typically quite independent of the formal organizational structure,
characteristic of the ore successful companies, and management’s relative unawareness of either he importance
of, and in many cases, even the existence of those networks.
Furthermore, the “information stars” were central to information
flow both within the organization at large, and within their project or projects. The
characteristics that distinguished these stars were:
extensive communication with their field outside of the
organization greater perusal of information sources, journals, etc.,
information mavens a high degree of connectedness with other information stars, one
can infer that their utility was not just having more information at their fingertips, but
knowing to whom to turn within
the organization for further information an above average degree of formal education compared to their
project teammates These characteristics of information stars were further
corroborated by Mondschein, L. [1990]
in a study of R&D activities across several industries.
One of the more intriguing of Allen’s findings, given the
context and the nature of security restrictions, was that the more successful teams made less use
of external consultants. At first glance, this seems surprising, because wouldn’t external consultants
help bring in that external information that would be helpful?The answer seems to be that the more
successful teams had better gatekeepers.
The teams with better gatekeepers needed external consultants
less, and consequently, used them less.
Another finding was that the information flow structure was not
at all closely related to the formal organizational structure, and that the information stars
did not map onto any consistent pattern of organizational placement or level. The relationship between
formal organizational structure and the information flow structure also seems to be in part a
function of the larger corporate culture.
For example, Frost andWhitley [1971]
adopted Allen’s techniques to examine information flow in R&D labs in the U.K., and they found a somewhat higher
overlap between formal organizational structure and the information flow structure than Allen had
found in the U.S. There is a suggestion here that the more rigid the organizational hierarchy, the more
the information flow structure is constrained to adapt itself to the formal organizational
structure.
Tushman, M. [1977], Tushman and Scanlan [1981a,b] further extended the Allen tradition. Tushman examined development activities, both at the
departmental level and at the project level, at a medical instruments company, and very much confirmed Allen’s
conclusions. He introduced and added the concept of “boundary spanning” or boundary spanner to
describe verymuch the same phenomenon that Allen described as gatekeeping.He extended Allen’s work by
distinguishing between two types of communication stars, “internal communication stars”
and “external communication stars,” and defining boundary spanners as those who were both
internal and external communication stars.The emphasis is clearly directed to projects and project
management, and the “take home” theme is that boundary spanners should be recognized, utilized,
and nurtured for facilitating project success.
In the context of KM, this tradition relates very directly to
the development of Communities of Practice (CoP). Given the relative
non-alignment of organizational structure and information flowand sharing,CoPs can be seen as the setting up of an
alternative structure to facilitate information flow and sharing.
RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE
The ‘Gatekeepers, Information Stars & Boundary Spanner’
tradition is very consistent with a substantial body of work studying research productivity. Koenig,M. [1992a], for example, in the context of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, studied the relationship
between research productivity and the information environment in which that research was conducted.
The productivity measure was, at base, simply the number of approved new drugs (new drug
applications or NDAs) per millions of dollars of R&D budget. This measure, however, was refined by
weighting the NDAs in regard to:
1) whether or not the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) judged
the drug to be an “important therapeutic advance,”
2) the chemical novelty of the drug, and
3) the filing company’s patent position in regard to the drug, an indicator of where the bulk of the
research was done.
The study is compelling because of the high face validity of the measure of
success, the successful introduction of new pharmaceutical agents, since that is what pharmaceutical
companies are about after all, and because of the statistical robustness of the results, a
consequence of the fact that the more successful companies were found to be not just twenty or thirty percent
more productive than the not so successful companies, they were two or three hundred percent
more productive.
The more productive companies were characterized by:
A relatively egalitarian managerial structure with unobtrusive
status indicators in the R&D environment,
Less concern with protecting proprietary information, Greater openness to outside information, greater use of their
libraries and information centers, specifically, greater attendance by employees at professional
meetings, Greater information systems development effort, Greater end-user use of information systems and more
encouragement of browsing and serendipity. Increased time spent browsing and keeping abreast, Greater technical and subject sophistication of the information
services staff.
Note the relationship with research/project success and a corporate
culture that is relatively egalitarian and enjoys relatively unobtrusive status indicators. Also most
interesting is that the correlation with concern for protecting the confidentiality of proprietary
information was negative, and it was also the strongest single correlation with research project success,
and with an unassailably high statistical significance.
This topic is well covered in a recent encyclopedia article [Koenig,M., 2009] “Productivity Impacts of Libraries and Information Services,” in the
Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences: 3rd Edition.
There are also, in this overall tradition, two books in recent
years that have been very well received and that offer valuable insights about information flow and
information use in a modern organizational environment,Davenport and Prusak [1998a]Working
Knowledge,and Brown and Duguid [2000a] The
Social Life of Information.
LACK OF RECOGNITION OF THESE FINDINGS IN THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY
As Allen pointed out in his study, there is a surprising lack of
recognition of these findings about the importance of information stars in the business community.
This is, in fact, a subset of an even larger problem - the lack of recognition of or even obtuseness
to the importance of information and information related managerial actions in the business
community. For example, one major study that reviewed a large corpus of work on R&D innovation, [Goldhar et al., 1976], concluded that there are six characteristics of environments that are conducive
to technological innovations. The three most important characteristics are all related to the
information environment and information flow – specifically: 1) easy access to information by
individuals; 2) free flow of information both into and out of the organizations; 3) rewards for sharing, seeking,
and using “new” externally developed information sources. Note the ‘flow in and out’ and the
‘sharing, seeking, and using’. Number six is also information environment related, 6) the encouragement of
mobility and interpersonal contacts.
Yet in a remarkable oversight, the studies’ authors never
remarked on the dramatic win, place, and show finish of information and knowledge factors.
Another similarly rigorous study [Orpen,
C., 1985]
examined productivity in R&D intensive electronics/instrumentation organizations. It analyzed various
aspects of the behavior of research project managers as perceived by their staff and team members,
and it found that in the more productive organizations (as defined by rates of growth and return on
assets), the managers were perceived to be significantly more characterized by three aspects of their
behavior, all information related:
1) they routed literature and references to scientific and
technical staff, 2) they directed their staff to use scientific and technical information (STI) and to purchase
STI services, and 3) they encouraged publication of results and supported professional meeting
attendance and continuing education.Particularly striking was the finding that not only did information related
management behavior tend strongly to discriminate between “high-performance” and
“low-performance” companies, but also that none of the non information related management behaviors
measured had any discriminatory value.
Here, given the inability to find any significance for other
managerial factors, the failure to remark upon the importance of information and knowledge factors can
truly be described as remarkable.
COMMUNITY-BASEDMODELS
The idea of Community of Practice [Wenger
and Snyder, 1999],
which descends logically from the “Gatekeepers, Information Stars, Boundary Spanners” stream
of development has been cited frequently as an important knowledge sharing model. The
Community of Practice (CoP) is not necessarily department-based nor centered in one
organization.ACoP can consist of those in charge of human resources training, for example, in a number of
organizations. These HR professionals can share what they’ve learned through experience about
effective seminar scheduling and working with speakers. Reading a book about effective HR training is one
way to learn, but sharing what experienced trainers know is a whole different level of learning.
This model is based on the premise that organizational members with similar interests or practices
meet to discuss issues of mutual concern and to help each other solve problems. The meeting can
often happen in electronic-based forums, and these online discussions are usually self-managing.
The Information Systems literature points to an abundance
ofKMstrategies in the category of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Such systems provide the
infrastructure for enabling the interactions needed for a group’s knowledge synergies and
interactive activities [Maier, R., 2002] and may include bulletin boards, electronic
meeting/conferencing, or online chat. In this model, the notion of space [Ruhleder, K., 2002],
physical or otherwise, is important primarily because the meeting place or system provides an environment that allows
for interactions to unfold, at the convenience of individual participants, often
asynchronously. Further, such CMC interactions allow for the creation of persistent records [Robins, J., 2002] of the interactions. Chat and other kind of social media transcriptions can be preserved too as
another example. To the extent that discourse occurs through such interactions, the dialectics can
be archived for future reference and subsequent “reuse.” However, as Hislop,
D. [2002]
points out, while technology may provide the tools for interaction and communication, the application of
technology alone may not be a sufficient condition for sustaining the creation and sharing of knowledge.
Another issue with conversational records,Twitter
transcripts,and email exchanges as opposed to more traditional knowledge representations in books and
journal articles, is that discourse records are not by nature indexed unless a researcher has chosen a set
of records for study. A lack of key words,index terms, or metadata on transcriptions and other
knowledge aids means that the embedded knowledge can be lost to those who wish to re-use the saved
text. Information retrieval and natural language processing have made great advances and may, in the
future, be able to help find relevant material, but there are still concerns related to large text,
audio and video files that their value may be lost because the content will be forbiddingly difficult or
impossible to access.
Group Decision Support Systems (GDSSs) were originally conceived
of as collaborative tools where groups came together, participated in brainstorming and
then, through human facilitation, voted on items and issues important to the organization.These
systems allowed for anonymous voting that moved decisions along rapidly by prioritizing topics more
easily than trying to do so without the system’s assistance. Participants’ knowledge and experience
contributed to the democratic process.
Another advantage of Group Decision Support Systems, in general,
is the ability for each person to speak (through entering opinions via a keypad, or original
ideas via a keyboard) anonymously without fear of being politically incorrect or worrying about
speaking in opposition to the manager.
Contributions could be confidential with the shy on an even
plane with the extroverts. A Group Decision Support System (GDSS) is able to calculate the votes
and display them graphically, so that an individual attending the meeting can see if she or he
were an outlier on certain issues or to determine where his or her vote stood as compared with
peers. Although anonymous, each participant can have a unique code, known only to the
participant, and follow voting patterns on the graphic display. These systems work well in a face-to-face
situation where immediate feedback can be given and displayed. The GDSS has not migrated easily to theWeb,
however, some web-based systems are available and have adapted to an asynchronous
situation. The ability for groups to share knowledge and make decisions using decision technology tools is
a beneficial way to combine human know-how and experience with database and display systems. In
situations where a range of new products is being considered for development, for example, or a
location must be chosen for a new facility as another example, staff can each register opinions
and share what they know in order to help make a decision in which they will all be invested because of
involvement in the decision making process. These kinds of “invested” decisions cause less friction
and are embraced more fully than unilateral ones.
Generic Decision Support Systems (DSS) that act more like expert
systems with the added feature of suggesting decision options are well suited to the
Web, and they are proliferating as the Web becomes the ubiquitous information and communication
platform for information storage and retrieval, and for interaction as well.The range ofWeb-based
DSSs vary in quality fromthemundane (e.g., cosmetics or movie choices) to sophisticated tools such
as diagnosing illnesses and suggesting appropriate drug therapies. Especially in the medical domain,
DSS systems have taken the burden of calculating dangerous drug interactions from the physician’s
shoulders and offer drug suggestions that include cautions about side effects and problems with other
prescriptions patients already have.
Anyone can useWebMD or Isabel to test his or her own symptoms
against the collected wisdom of clinical experts who have contributed to the systems’ “knowledge
bases.” Generally, these reputable clinical decision support systems are advised by an independent
board of medical professionals, and they rely on the experts’ knowledge in order to make suggestions
for conditions and treatment. Other dependable DSSs have used the expertise of meteorologists to
predict storms, knowledge of cattle managers to give advice on culling herds, or the know-how of
environmentalists on managing water resources. No doubt, these systems will be replaced by others as
technology advances, and their capabilities and functionality will increase.
REPOSITORYMODEL
The knowledge management repository, a space to store and
retrieve knowledge objects has long been a standard in KMprograms. It is a model that emphasizes the
creation of quality knowledge content in online repositories with re-use as a goal. Markus, M. [2001] argues that the purpose and content of knowledge records in repositories often differ depending on
who needs the documentation: the content producer, similar others, or dissimilar others. She
emphasizes that a great deal of effort is required to produce quality content, and, as such, part of the
burden of documenting and packaging knowledge objects can be transferred to intermediaries, saving
time and energy of the organization’s staff. In addition, adding context is also another aspect of
making content more usable. Markus proposes the roles of human intermediaries in what she terms as
“repurposing” of repositories to make them more appropriate for use by others. Examples of
activities that could be performed include abstracting, indexing, authoring, and sanitizing or
scrubbing content. Because of the costs involved in repackaging and making repository knowledge content
more usable to the knowledge seeker,Markus looks to an expanded role for technological
support of core competencies of librarians, archivists, data curators, and other information professionals.
Those in the education and training fields may also see great
potential in repository and reuse applications. For example, an entire course can be broken down
into chunks with the smalle segments presented as just-in-time training on request. Or
smaller pieces of a fairly elaborate course can be presented as a workshop or half-day session or even as an
abbreviated online webinar with a question and answer session following. Financial firms, IT departments,
law firms and others who depend on frequently updated information and new legislative
materials are just a few types of organizations that can make good use of the repository and
re-use model.
ACTIVITY-BASED MODELS
While there has been significant work done in terms of
Information Systems support for the coordination of work [Winograd,T., 1988],
the next logical progression would be to link knowledge production and capture with work processes. For example, Blackler, F. [1995] considers knowledge in organizations as socially distributed collective activity
systems, and emphasizes the significance of incoherence and dilemma as the key issues in social systems.
Similarly, Engeström, Y. [1999] research, using activity systems as cycles of expansive learning
in work practices, also points to the importance of activities as providing the necessary context for
grounding organizational knowledge.
Based on such a historical-cultural perspective of activity, Hasan, H. [2003] proposed rudiments of a KM system influenced by activity-based models that would
link work activities with people and content. Continued development of the model would
focus on the motivation of people to contribute content and the meaningfulness of information and
knowledge that can be extracted from the contents of such an activity-based system.
Incorporating workflow support with a knowledge repository, Kwan and Balasubramanian [2003]
take the notion a step further; they propose the design of a KMsystem they call KnowledgeScope that provides
integrated workflow support to capture and retrieve knowledge as an organizational process
within the context it is created and used.
They also propose a meta-model knowledge structure called
Knowledge-In-Context that specifies relationships among processes. The model was implemented with
limited workflow functions at a global telecommunications company.While repositories and
workflow support have largely developed with limited integration, designs such as this, grounded in case
implementations, provide some empirical validity as to the appropriateness and value of
incorporating activity as context for knowledge reuse. This emphasis upon context can be seen as part of the
maturation of KM as described above
in the discussion of stage IV of KM development.
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