Knowledge circulation in a telecommunications company: a preliminary survey

How does knowledge circulate in complex, interdisciplinary organizations? How can we support that circulation of knowledge through documentation, information systems, and information design? Technical communicators have become interested in these questions lately, particularly with the recent turn to social, cultural, and interpretive theoretical frameworks. In particular, we have become interested in how workers create and share knowledge, how they impart expertise, how they surmount area differences, and how they use communication technologies (from computer databases to messaging systems to handwritten notes) to facilitate their work communication. But studies of knowledge circulation in technical communication have typically focused on individuals or small groups rather than entire organizations. Few major workplace studies have been done with an emphasis on knowledge circulation, especially as it occurs across many functional areas, such as might be found in a medium-sized company.In this paper, I overview the complex circulation of knowledge at a midsized (300+ worker) regional telecommunications company. Through interviews with 84 workers across the company (part of a larger study that also involves observational and archival research), I explore how workers produce and record new knowledge; how they draw on resources and strategies to examine knowledge coming in from other parts of the company; how they learn and draw on specialized social languages in the course of this knowledge work; and how they encounter difficulties due to various organizational factors.I conclude by discussing implications for how we design and document information systems that support knowledge circulation and point to how the results of this analysis will be triangulated and integrated with other data.