ABSTRACT
Our research is concerned with the processes of collaboration that are required by organizations as they increasingly adopt more network-like organization structures (Drucker, 1988; Huber, 1984; Malone, Yates, & Benjamin, 1987). We want to understand the kinds of communication that are needed and design information technologies to support them (Boland & Tenkasi, 1995; Boland, Tenkasi, & Te’eni, 1994). By network-like organizations we mean those that resemble open systems as described by Hewitt (1985, 1986).Open systems are composed of decentralized, autonomous units, each with different and inconsistent knowledge bases. Open systems are characterized by distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1996; Norman, 1993) in which the task of the organization is achieved by individuals and technologies acting independently within their own domains on parts of the overall problem, but taking each other and their interdependencies into account in their actions. In a network-like, open system organization, coordination emerges within this process of distributed cognition.
