Mapping experience: Understanding socio-technical inter-team knowledge sharing in product development communities

Recognizing the need for inter-team learning and knowledge sharing, some product development organizations have recently implemented various systems and processes such as “best practice” database and “design capture and sharing” systems. While some of these systems have shown demonstrable success in other contexts (e.g. field service and manufacturing), implementation of such systems in the product development domain has been problematic.; This thesis attempts to bring a socio-technical design perspective to the study of knowledge sharing in product development contexts. Two major ethnographically informed field studies are reported—the ME310 pilot study and the DocCom study. Existing document-based knowledge sharing systems in ME310 and DocCom were studied. Recognizing the limitations of document-based systems, an experimental interaction-based knowledge sharing framework was developed and implemented. Using observational techniques (such as interaction analysis) developed in the social sciences, an interesting set of interactional features that facilitate learning were discovered. A descriptive model of learning interactions was constructed based on the identified features. From insights gained through the analysis and the development of the model, several key socio technical implications for the design of similar learning systems were identified.; The research contributions of this thesis are three-fold: (1) Identified conditions of inter-team learning and knowledge sharing in product development organizations; (2) Discovered and modeled the social and technical mechanisms that people use to overcome barriers to learning from experienced peers in product development; (3) Defined new design requirements for socio-technical learning and knowledge sharing systems.