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At the Boundary of Communities and Roles: Boundary Objects and Knowledge Artifacts as Resources for IS Design

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From Information to Smart Society

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation ((LNISO,volume 5))

Abstract

Boundary Objects and Knowledge Artifacts are physical entities that can be found in many socio-material settings in the organizational (and inter-organizational) domain, and share many characteristics. We make the point that an increasing number of authors mention either constructs partly unaware of their denotational meaning, i.e., the precise meaning it has been attached to them by their proponents to make them meaningful and useful. The risk is having these concepts lose their rhetorical, descriptive and applicative power. We contribute in stressing the importance to reconsider the denotational meaning in contrast to the metaphorical ones of these two concepts, for their role in the analysis of the functions of real objects supporting collaboration and knowledge work. This is done towards the more accurate elicitation of requirements for the digitization of these objects, as well as for the design and deployment of new IT artifacts in the organizational domain.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this view, also the loose interaction between the writer of a book and its readers can be considered as a sort of asynchronous and distributed collaboration, and the book as playing the role of mediator in the unidirectional information exchange enabled by its reading.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Viale Sarca 336, 20126, Milan, Italy

    Federico Cabitza

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  1. Federico Cabitza
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Correspondence to Federico Cabitza .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Lapo Mola

  2. Department of Management and Technology, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

    Ferdinando Pennarola

  3. CeRSI Research Center in Information Systems, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy

    Stefano Za

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Cabitza, F. (2015). At the Boundary of Communities and Roles: Boundary Objects and Knowledge Artifacts as Resources for IS Design. In: Mola, L., Pennarola, F., Za, S. (eds) From Information to Smart Society. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09450-2_13

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