Knowledge boundary spanning and productivity in information systems support community

a r t i c l e i n f o An information systems (IS) support community represents a knowledge-intensive network where IS professionals interact with end-users to resolve system use problems during the IS post-implementation stage. For IS professionals in the support function, providing support for multiple information systems to multiple business units requires knowledge about different domains (business units or technical systems). In this paper, we take a network perspective to empirically evaluate the effects of an IS worker's network position and knowledge boundary spanning on productivity. Drawing upon theories of experiential learning and knowledge boundary, we perform social network analysis and linear mixed effects modeling to analyze archival data comprising 36 IS workers and 23,450 support requests made by 4568 end-users during the first 13 months post SAP/R3 implementation in a large U.S. organization. Our findings reveal that IS workers' network centrality and boundary spanning positively influence productivity. Surprisingly, their boundary-spanning experience plays a substantially more important role than network centrality. This study makes important contributions to theory and practice in individual experiential learning in knowledge-intensive networks. Organizational support for a newly-installed information system (IS) is a knowledge-intensive setting where IS professionals engage in frequent knowledge sharing activities with their business colleagues and provide them with information, knowledge and solutions in a timely manner. Such an IS support community comprises of both end-users (business employees) who use the system to accomplish their work and IS professionals (support personnel) who provide support for system use and maintenance. We consider IS professionals in such a context knowledge workers, as they utilize their knowledge and expertise to support organizational use of the implemented systems. As such, their ability to share knowledge effectively with business employees in an organization is critical to the efficiency of IS support operation. For example, prompt and effective resolutions by IS support personnel enable employees to perform their IS-enabled work, promoting organizational use of IS [7] and facilitating the extended use of IS [24]. In contrast, their failure to efficiently address users' requests is found to cause user frustration and disruption in work [44]. Moreover, the knowledge required to efficiently perform IS support work cannot simply be a body of knowledge to be learned once. Rather, it is acquired through a dynamic process of learning from work-based activities dedicated to the support tasks at hand. Thus, understanding the factors contributing to IS workers' learning and productivity …