Designing Information Technology to Support Distributed Cognition

Abstract

Cognition in organizations is a distributed phenomenon, in which individual members of an organization reflect upon their experience, make plans, or take action. Organizational learning or organizational cognition are familiar terms, but it is only the individual persons in an organization who create interpretations and test understandings, as they think and learn in their organizational setting. Coordinated outcomes emerge in organizations when individuals think and act in ways that take others in the organization and their interdependencies into account. We argue that much of the effort to design information technology to support cognition in organizations has not addressed its distributed quality. Such systems have tended to focus either on the individual as an isolated decision maker, or on the group as a producer of a decision or policy statement in common. In distributed cognition, by contrast, the group is a set of autonomous agents who act independently yet recognize that they have interdependencies. To guide the design of information technology, we propose that distributed cognition be viewed as a hermeneutic process of inquiry, emphasizing the importance of individual interpretation and group dialogue. Hermeneutics provides a theory of the interpretive process through which an individual gives meaning to organizational experience. Inquiry systems provide a theory of how a community of inquirers build and test knowledge representations through dialogue. Together, hermeneutics and inquiry systems are used to propose a set of design principles to guide the development of information technology that supports distributed cognition. The design principles we describe in the paper are ownership, easy travel, multiplicity, indeterminacy, emergence and mixed forms. Applications of information technology which embody these design principles would support distributed cognition by assisting individuals in making interpretations of their situation, reflecting on them, and engaging in dialogue about them with others. The objective is to refine their own understanding of the situation and better appreciate the understandings of others, enabling them to better take their interdependencies into account in their individual actions. A project to develop such a system is discussed, along with some implications for research.

Rethinking organizational learning: analyzing learning processes of information system designers

“…Purposeful learning has also been subject to those writers who argue that organizations can learn through the use of information systems. In general, authors within this perspective assert that information systems can be built to support this deutero or institutionalized learning (e.g., Boland, Tenkasi & Te'eni, 1994;Jelinek, 1979;Johnson-Laird, 1988;Shrivastava, 1983;Stata, 1989).…”

Technology-enhanced language learning (TeLL): An update and a principled framework for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses / L'apprentissage des langues assisté par la technologie (TeLL): mise à jour et énoncé de principes pour les cours

“…TeLL's main pedagogical challenge for language practitioners who operate in a conventional course setting resides not only in the fact that a culture and a social system has been brought into a classroom, but that such a socio-cultural dimension is condensed in a technology whose design is based on social cognition (Boland, Tenkasi & Te'eni, 1994;Orlikowski, 2002). The challenge of a TeLL teaching and learning process has become that of a mastery of a socio-cultural task.…”

The Role of Negotiation Objects in Managing Meaning Across E-Collaboration Systems

“…These enable them to share common meanings (for example, "why we do it this way") without the need for complex explanations (Boland et al, 1994;Cook and Brown, 1999;Weick, 1995). This perspective-sharing requires not only shared knowledge, but also a shared system of norms, behavior, expectations and (inter-) personal identities that indicates why a specific term or way of performing a task is significant (Brown and Duguid, 1991;Lave and Wenger, 1991;Weick, 1995).…”