IT‐based knowledge management to support organizational learning: Visa application screening at the INS

The purpose of this paper is to explore how to reconcile the contradiction between two paradigms employed in analyzing IT‐related change requirements: knowledge‐as‐thing versus knowledge‐as‐process.

These tensions are explored in the high‐risk decision‐making environment of an Immigration and Naturalization Service agency. The study combines competitive intelligence risk‐analysis methods with an ethnographic analysis of knowledge‐flows, to determine how the roles of human decision‐makers may be supported effectively by ICT‐based knowledge support.

The findings demonstrate how high‐risk decision‐making may be analyzed as a integrated hybrid human/ICT intelligence system. The study exposes detailed mechanisms by which knowledge of different forms is transferred, exposing failures in training, interpersonal communications, ICT system support, and reward structures. Four roles for ICT support are identified, to supplement human intelligence effectively.

This research is based on an investigation across knowledgeable experts in various geographical locations, functional contexts, and organizational roles in a single government agency. Future research could seek to explore whether our distinctions between knowledge types and ICT‐roles are transferable across different organizations.

Four stages of analysis for a hybrid intelligence framework are suggested: risk‐category identification; the application of risk‐categories to decision‐cases; testing and adapting categorizations against global conditions; and transfer of locally‐meaningful categorizations of risk across communities of practice.

The contributions of this paper are: to provide a taxonomy for the analysis of organizational knowledge‐flows; and to suggest a framework for the analysis of roles for human vs. ICT knowledge management in distributed, high‐risk decision‐making environments.