Designing Platforms to Support Knowledge-Intensive Organizational Work

This is a story of a design science research project that started in one domain, petrochemical refineries, before extending into another, technology consulting. Across the two domains, the problem was scoped, defined and refined as one of supporting knowledge-intensive work that takes place over time and across locations with teams of specialists. Significant empirical work and design efforts in fields like knowledge management, collaborative work, and business process design have yet to provide clear paths to successful intervention in this problem. We relied on design science research (DSR) and action design research (ADR) methods as we worked to develop two context-specific solutions. One solution, SPA, used semantic analysis of operator procedures for organizations in petrochemical refining to generate meaningful instruction sets in support of collaborative work on the refinery floor. The other solution, ReKon, decomposed consulting templates into meaningful sections for technology consulting so knowledge workers could access these templates across project phases in response to new consulting assignments. Together, the two artifacts exemplify a key design principle: anchoring knowledge units, not task sequences, in concrete artifacts may improve knowledge workers’ ability to respond to emergent complexities in knowledge-intensive work. The research project revealed three primary lessons. First, the time-consuming tasks of stakeholder interaction and development of seemingly simple artifacts allowed us to surface the complexities of organizational knowledge work in these domains. Second, ongoing and intense reflection away from the project activities was necessary to appreciate the theoretical depth. Third, the messy nature of design continued to grate against the systematic approach suggested by research methods.