Drivers of knowledge conversion in socio-technical systems

Development and maintenance of an Information System to support operations of a socio-technical system, such as a manufacturing enterprise, is a demanding endeavour for IT professionals, who need to achieve a deep understanding of them. Socio-technical systems are complex adaptive systems with an interplay of social and technical aspects that aim at achieving goals in a competitive turbulent work environment. One of the main difficulties for IT professional is requirements collection since there is often a misalignment between the managerial perspective of the work (WAI: Work-As-Imagined) and the one as performed by sharp-end operators (WAD: Work-As-Done). Such misalignment is originated by several knowledge transfer acts between different system agents that could transform knowledge. We propose a classification of the main drivers of such knowledge conversion and we discuss them in the context of information systems engineering.