Mobile Virtual Work A New Paradigm phần 8 potx

282 Robert M Verburg et al.12.5 MVW in practice: IT-support for home care in Sweden A mobile information system for work support in home care organisations, Permitto Care, was originally

280 Robert M Verburg et al.

pen, the information of which was downloaded once a week at the main office At the same time, employees would submit their time sheets, which were then the basis of payroll The new practice has decreased office vis-its: now the office is visited once every two weeks to load the van and once every two months for a team meeting Otherwise, the hours are spent

in the service field Both employer and employees are content with this working mode

Earlier, assignments and acute work tasks were sent to the device in the van, and in crisis situations the customer service centre had to phone the serviceman on duty in addition to sending the assignment to the device Now any sudden assignments can be sent to the work location, and the servicemen do not need to return to the van to read the assignment The new practice has clarified the method of contacting employees

Not using certain features is … positive? The palm computer could, cording to the interviewees, be used also in the follow-up and control of working hours, since the time of the ”first opened job” is recorded into it, and also the out-booking each day is registered in the machine It would also be possible to monitor the routes taken and locations where employees are Employees feel that they are trusted, and, therefore, the monitoring of beginning time, out-bookings or routes has not been implemented Trust is very important to them On the other hand, servicemen conceive GPS monitoring as a safety factor and an opportunity: if something were to happen, the man on the move could easily be located

ac-Accelerated customer service is the main value and object Although the objective for mobile device development was to attain a portable reporting method, the main value has been in customer service On-the-go reporting from the job location boosts customer service and invoicing The reports

on maintenance acts could be forwarded to clients quicker than before Problems are linked with the reliability of the programme operations The Feature programme operations are unreliable and the programme can, for instance, lose report information The employee does not receive a con-firmation upon reception of the information he has reported Often, the loss

of report information is only discovered when the foreman asks for time sheets Employees keep a manual double ledger on their work performance

in order to remember the details, so that payroll and client invoicing can be taken care of

The development work on the added features, e.g text messages and telephone calls, continues The telephone feature has only been tested for a short period – the telephone development has not been the main issue Be-cause of the problems in the working mode of the phone some of the tester employees have given up the use of the telephone Answering incoming

calls shuts off the other operations – the caller can hear this as a delay when the call is answered Some interviewees were bothered by this delay The most serious obstacle for work was losing unfinished reports when answering an incoming call After ending the call, the work had to be re-sumed from the beginning Employees would be keen to continue complet-ing the report, which they consider a routine, even during a phone call And if there are many incoming calls, being able to continue writing the report during them would be a time-saver

The employees dream about the possibility to answer their incoming calls while carrying out a maintenance task without having to stop work-ing However, when using for instance the (loud) speaker feature the re-ceiver of the phone call is disturbed by a strong echo that prohibits the message from coming or going through

Using text message services (SMS) requires reasonably good eyesight Some interviewees find the service easy to use and say they ”even write poems”; some hardly ever use the service because of having trouble seeing the text

According to both employer and employees the device encompasses countless other possibilities for developing work and its processes Both groups are well disposed for further development steps The employees in-terviewed emphasized the process of continuous joint development

12.4.5 Conclusions

The design and implementation of a new device and software, and a plan

of action succeeded well, although technical problems have also been herent such as losing information Technical problems seem to be the main challenge for future developments Employees are, however, satisfied with their new tool The main reason for this is the involvement of servicemen

in-in the development work Train-inin-ing to use the system was also emphasized The new practice has decreased office visits and time for the core opera-tions in the maintenance area has increased There are fewer face-to-face meetings of employees and supervisors, and the employees have great autonomy The relationship between the employer and employees is trust-ful based on the results of work, and not on monitoring the detailed time usage of employees An employee starts his work from home and returns there after service visits to customers Co-workers are contacted to get help and advice via phone In addition, they meet sporadically on the road in services stations during lunch and coffee breaks and for chatting and ex-changing work-related information In the future, technical deficiencies are improved, and the use of new tools and practices will be disseminated

282 Robert M Verburg et al.

12.5 MVW in practice: IT-support for home care in Sweden

A mobile information system for work support in home care organisations, Permitto Care, was originally developed by Telia, a large Swedish telecom company The initial development was carried out in close cooperation with the home care staff in Nordanstig, a municipality in northern Sweden Much effort was needed to make the system support the actual needs of the personnel Nordanstig’s community covers an area of 1380 kmP

2

and has 10.000 inhabitants, i.e approximately 7.2 inhabitants/kmP

2

The home care work is characterized by large distances between the clients, resulting in much traveling for the personnel This gives them limited opportunities to visit the common premises and few possibilities to consult and share knowledge with other colleagues It also makes it difficult to perform vari-ous administrative tasks in the office Figure 12.2 shows a group of proud Swedish home care nurses with their mobile devices

The mobile technical support system was very much appreciated by its users and received much external attention; it was e.g nominated for the

“Users price” by UsersAward, Sweden (www.usersaward.se) Other nicipalities were also very interested in the system and it was implemented

mu-in several other home care services mu-in different communities mu-in Sweden

Fig 12.2 A group of home care nurses with their mobile equipment, implemented

in a Nokia Communicator 9210i

This case especially focuses on why a system, that is very efficient and appreciated in one setting, is not equally well functioning in another set-ting We are here interested in analyzing the effects of introducing the Permitto Care system in a new setting

12.5.1 Intended use

The mobile IT-system Permitto Care gave its users, the home care nurses,

a tool to improve their internal communication Through the system they could easily get in contact with colleagues, ask questions and share their knowledge A main objective with the system was to facilitate for the users

to start their working day from home, in order to quicker reach the clients and carry out the morning visits The time needed for administration and planning could be significantly reduced The mobile system could further make it possible to access and enter information about the care taker before and after each home visit The events and care activities performed could

be instantaneously documented

12.5.2 The system implemented in another environment

The Permitto Care system is today also used in Hökarängen, a densely populated suburb in the Stockholm area At the time of this study, the IT-system had been used for one and a half years Results and conclusions of

an interview with representatives from the personnel about their ences with Permitto Care are here presented

di-Aspects of mobility

A normal working day starts with a short briefing in the home care sation’s office, then follows the morning round to the clients, lunch brake, the afternoon round and finally an informal meeting in the office and a rounding up of the day The personnel mostly perform their rounds alone, but more demanding clients require a coordination allowing help from an assisting colleague or from the separate home health care team

organi-284 Robert M Verburg et al.

Communication and collaboration tools

During the home visits, a Nokia Communicator (9210i) running the mitto Care system is carried along by the personnel The Permitto Care system provides its users with possibilities for communication and infor-mation support needed in the work activities, i.e.:

Per-• Mobile communication with other care givers by text messages and phone

• Access to individual care plans and detailed information about the ents

cli-• Reading and writing care notes about individual clients

• Contact information about the clients and their relatives

• Planning and work schedules for the personnel

The interaction with the Permitto Care system is web-based and has two web interfaces that differ in the layout The first is for a web browser on a stationary computer and the other one is for the web browser in the Nokia Communicator To reach data in the system the nurses have to log in with

a user name and a password The interface on the stationary computer tains quite some functionality and is meant for administrative work, while the mobile interface is designed for the operative work and is less detailed System data are up- and downloaded from a server and never stored lo-cally on the client device for security reasons Data in the system are sent over an encrypted data connection

con-12.5.3 Performance and outcomes

The system is well received by its users at the home health care service in Hökarängen, and is considered relatively easy to learn and to operate The employees feel appreciated when they are offered a modern IT-system Appreciated features in the system are the main documentation function,

“the care taker record” It makes it easy for the nurses to read and write notes about the care taker they visit The record keeping is carried out much better with the new system compared to before

The paper work has also been reduced to a great extent Now everyone can access information available in the system By using the system, it is possible for the home care nurses to reach information about the clients While on the move information about medicines, contact information of their relatives or entry codes to the doors can be easily obtained Savings

in time have also been achieved since the briefing meetings in the morning can now be reduced from half an hour to five minutes

12.5.4 Unanticipated use of the system

The time it takes the system to create the network connection is quite long

It entails the start of the web browser, to perform the user authorization and to load the Permitto Care web pages is To start-up and log into the system, in order to write a record note for a certain care taker, takes an av-erage user 2 minutes and 50 seconds

If one home care nurse visits 15 clients a day, the time waiting for the system would be 2 5/6 min × 15 = 42,5 minutes per day If this is true for the whole home care team of 10 care givers, working 5 days a week (which is not really true when home health care personnel also works in evenings and during the week ends), that makes 42,5 × 10 × 5 = 2125 / 60

≈ 35,5 hours per week – almost equal to a full time position!

Just a few days after the personnel at the home health care centre in Hökarängen had started to use the Permitto Care system, it became clear that to log into the system after each visit at a care taker took too much time The nurses created therefore new routines to use the system They now carry out just a few logins into the system during a day; in the begin-ning of the day, at lunch and at the end of the day, i.e all occasions when the users are meeting in the office Once in the office it is more quiet and easier to concentrate than when one is on the move Help and support from colleges is also within easy reach

The mobile device, the Nokia Communicator, is still carried along on the round to the clients but it is seldom used as a computer As a mobile phone, however, it is much appreciated and frequently used Many em-ployees prefer to use a desktop computer at the premises rather than their mobile communicator

The system’s long start up time has the following consequences:

• Users do not write their documentation for each visit at a care taker Thereby, the intended effects are lost, e.g the benefits of a frequently updated system, of information written into the system while it is still fresh in the mind, of secure storage of information, and of backup ad-vantages

• Information that is supposed to be documented during the visit to the clients is instead remembered or briefly written on paper notes The in-formation is entered into the IT-system first when they reach the office Some users prefer using the stationary computer for entering the infor-mation into the system A stationary computer has much more advan-tages than a small, mobile one; it is faster, easier to work with (with its mouse and proper keyboard) and has a bigger screen that provides a bet-

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ter overview of the system In this way, the mobile qualities of the mitto Care system are seldom utilized

Per-• When writing down things to remember, some users prefer to use paper notes or the note-application in the Nokia Communicator, an application that is not a part of the Permitto Care system Both ways are much faster

• In the same way, entry codes to the client’s home are sometimes stored

by the nurses in the phones local note application In this way the codes are much faster available when needed

• While on the move nurses prefer to make phone calls back to the ager at the office in order to report important occurrences and get them entered into the system

man-12.5.5 Conclusions and lessons learned

The Permitto Care system has, and has been rewarded for, a number of good qualities, e.g it is easy to learn, it provides the user with the correct information and it is well adapted to the needs of the organisation How-ever, the system’s long connection time results in unintended use, and a more or less total loss of intended efficiency This becomes even clearer when the system is studied in an environment where long travel distances and solitary work is less apparent

The slow network connection gives the users a general experience of the system as slow and difficult to handle As shown in this case, this results in

an unexpected way of using the system, caused by their intention to form well If the users find better, feasible, ways to achieve their goal without using the system as intended, these ways will be used In this case the better way to work was e.g not to use the system frequently as in-tended

per-A professional user tries to perform a task in a quick and effective way, without spending energy in preparing the tool for the task Our conclusions from this case confirm the notion that professionals will perform their task even if this is hampered by an IT-system that does not fit the nature of their work In this case, a mobile solution was provided to support the work of home care nurses but the specific nature of the work led to non-mobile use of the system The case underlines again the great benefits of early user involvement for the design and implementation of IT support tools in organisational context In order to benefit from mobile solutions a careful analysis of the context of use proofs to be vital

12.6 Overall conclusion

On basis of our detailed case analysis we have illustrated the use of mobile technology for work in different settings across four different countries Mobile work is often associated with the nomadic business traveller who can have access to fancy back offices anywhere on the globe through an array of lightweight and preferably integrated gadgets The cases in this chapter do not focus on this kind of mobile work but highlight the chang-ing nature of the day-to-day activities of service engineers, home care nurses, and customs controllers The work of these employees was already mobile even before the introduction of tablet PCs, PDAs, and communica-tors However, the introduction of mobile solutions has changed the work

of mobile employees tremendously For instance, in case of the service gineers in both Finland and Italy, employees do not start their working day

en-by going to the office but start their work when they enter their car and log

on to the central dispatch unit In case of the custom controllers in The Netherlands the mobile solution has changed their work day as the mobile solution enables the execution of more unscheduled work than before The introduction of mobile solutions changes the organisation and the in-volvement of users is therefore of vital importance The case of the home care nurses in Sweden is an example of what happens when users are not properly involved

On basis of the cases the following benefits of mobile work come ward:

for-• Employees experience more efficiency due to less travelling from and to the office

• Employees have much better access to information when outside of the office and do not depend on phone calls to colleagues in the back office

• Employees experience that they have more possibilities to ask for the help and advice of other colleagues on the job

The organisation benefits also in terms of more efficiency of the work processes:

• Data can be stored in the local database directly from the field rather than through additional data entry in the office

• Clients may be updated better, more easily, and more up to date mation can be conveyed

infor-• On the move employees can be tracked much easier and unscheduled work can be allocated much better

288 Robert M Verburg et al.

Overall the cases show a positive picture on the application of mobile solutions in practice Employees stress the benefits of their mobile work Possible barriers are of course a lack of user involvement as seen in the case of Sweden, but as long as users are involved mobile virtual work is perceived as a positive change Potential barriers or possible downsides, such as limitations of decision capabilities, a lack of employee autonomy and stronger propensity for employee control did not feature so much in the cases above As these factors proof to have negative impacts on em-ployee motivation, those remain a point of concern for the deployment of mobile virtual work in practice

The four cases described in this chapter show a mere refinement of an already virtual work process through the use of more able tools So far, there are not many examples of companies that have started new activities

on basis of the possibilities that are offered by today’s mobile gies Further research in the area of MVW would enable such companies

technolo-to adapt their mobile work practices more carefully Also, designers of mobile solutions may benefit from the detailed lists of requirements which come forward from the growing research into mobile work in practice In other words, it is necessary to identify the different enactments of the vari-ous mobile practices within different cultures and industries in order to clarify the do’s and don’ts of MVW

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Andrea Giacobbe and Silvia Massa for their work on the Siram case and thank the EC-funded MOSAIC-project (FP6-2003-IST-2 004341) and the SALTSA Mobility Group for their ongoing support in this project

Yin, R (1994) Case study research: design and methods Sage Publications, don

Lon-Zilliox D (2002) Get-started guide to m-commerce and mobile technology American Management Association, New York

Organisational Strategies

13 Knowledge Sharing in Mobile Work

Faculty of Engineering, University of Pisa, Italy

13.1 The KMS challenge in mobile context

Leveraging on people’s knowledge and creativity is a competitive must in today’s business environment The intensification of competition, how-ever, forces companies to adopt new organisational models that seriously challenge traditional approaches to managing knowledge Hence, this chapter answers the need of empirically grounded research to draw impli-cations of the systems supporting Knowledge Management (KM) within such new organizational models

When analyzed in terms of how people are integrated and relate to the rest of the organisation, many companies are characterized by two trends:

• Mobility and distribution of workforce: nowadays the concept itself of the workplace is changing People spend an increasing amount of their working time outside the physical boundaries of their company, often in mobility and interacting with customers or people from partner organi-zations (Laubacher and Malone 2003) Also when working inside the company, people often change positions and work in multi-disciplinary virtual teams As a consequence, individuals have fewer and fewer op-portunities for face to face interaction with their colleagues and can hardly rely on their own experience

• Turnover and loose contractual links: provisional nature of ment, loose forms of contractual links to the company and high level of turnover (Drucker 2002), while in many cases considered competitive needs, make people’s stay with organizations temporary and partial, thus creating barriers to the sharing of knowledge and expertise among individuals

employ-These two factors converge in what we call “Mobile Virtual Work” (MVW) MVW is done by different people in ever changing situations who need to collaborate and to be connected to shared resources in order to

achieve their common goals Being a “mobile virtual” (MV) worker is in many cases a necessity rather than a choice that requires personal qualities such as independence and entrepreneurship that were far less fundamental

in traditional organizations As far as professional growth and access to knowledge is concerned, MV workers cannot simply trust their company

HR development policies, but have to care, in first person, about creating growth opportunities and building a network of relations that, in many cases, transcend the boundaries of the company

Nowadays, MV workers represent an increasingly more relevant share

of the total workforce (Drucker 2002; Laubacher and Malone 2003) tional management systems are not adequate, simply because they were not designed to answer their needs Many management systems should be reviewed including rewarding training, and carrier paths, but the real es-sence of the change is probably related to Knowledge Management: when dealing with MV workers, KM becomes a fundamental need rather than a wish, for two reasons:

Tradi-• MV workers knowledge and experience are becoming a fundamental set for the company: only with a proper management of this knowledge,

as-in both tacit and explicit forms, the company can, at least partly, priate this knowledge

appro-• A proper Knowledge Management System (KMS) can:

− reconnect MV workers to the professional and social network of the company, preventing loss of knowledge

− provide them with opportunities for interaction and learning, thus supporting their job and their professional growth, long term em-ployability, ultimately improving job satisfaction and attractive-ness

When dealing with this issue, the biggest opportunities, but at the same time the biggest competitive challenges, are represented today by the availability of new ICT-enabled services, and in particular web applica-tions and mobile Value Added Services At a rapidly decreasing cost, these technologies are making it possible to overcome geographical, time and organizational barriers to communication and knowledge transfer in dis-persed networks

Theory on how to successfully implement new ICTs to manage edge for MV workers, however, is still in its infancy, and only anecdotal evidence about best practices is available today The challenge for man-agement theory is therefore clear: to provide empirically grounded and ac-tionable knowledge for companies to design and implement new ICT en-abled KM Systems able to extend the boundaries of their knowledge

knowl-13 Knowledge Sharing in Mobile Work 293

creation to their MV workers Based on comparison among three case studies, the chapter is a first attempt to draw implications on KMS re-quirements in mobile contexts

The issue of managing knowledge of a dispersed workforce has already been covered in economics and management literature mainly in connec-tion with the problems of preserving intellectual capital and competence from loss and spill over (Minkler 1993; Tsoukas 1996; Becker 2001; Cramton 2001; Maskell 2001)

For example, Minkler (1993) focuses on firms that tried to assess the importance of their dispersed knowledge; he emphasizes that some organ-izational innovations – employee participation, organization in cooperative teams, just-in-time stock management systems, forms of labour protection – are solutions that stem from firms’ awareness of the dispersion of their knowledge assets

The dispersion of knowledge exists in all organizations However, in traditional companies workers interact within the organizational physical boundaries, thus facilitating exchanges In fact, the level of knowledge dispersion has progressively increased over the past few years, exceeding previous boundaries Various factors contribute to this trend: internaliza-tion of markets, companies are more widespread within areas and product and service customization In many cases, these factors induce firms to de-crease the physical distance that separates them from their custom-ers/suppliers, having some employees temporarily located in the custom-ers’/suppliers’ offices In this context, the main problem is to create a technological and social infrastructure that allows knowledge and informa-tion transfer

Different authors have pointed out that there are many relevant izational and managerial effects resulting from the level of knowledge dis-persion Becker (2001) indicates three factors as the cause of organiza-tional problems: large numbers, asymmetries and uncertainty He also identifies some strategies allowing a better use of dispersed knowledge:

organ-• substitute knowledge with providing access to knowledge (individuals have to remember where it can be found), the recovery takes place only when it is necessary

• provide users with the capability of completing incomplete knowledge

• design institutions with appropriate coordination mechanisms

• decompose organizational units into smaller ones

• increase the information available to the decision-maker

Focusing on knowledge workers, Cramton (1997; 2001; 2002) identifies the problems that can occur when MV people communicate and collabo-

rate: 1) failures to communicate and retain contextual information ing different members; 2) interference between unevenly distributed in-formation and team-level collaboration, 3) differences in evaluating the relevance of information, 4) differences in speed of access to information and 5) difficulties in interpreting the meaning of silence/lack of communi-cation The main problems that may arise are: i) the propensity to ascribe peoples’ behaviour or results to members instead of to the situation, ii) the decrease in learning capacity, iii) the incapacity to reach other members’ expectations, and the damage of interpersonal reliance

regard-Many authors have analysed and proposed possible solutions to tate cooperation between mobile or geographically scattered workers or virtual teams (Cramton 1997; 2001; Furst et al 1999; Duarte and Snyder 1999; Lipnack and Stamps 1997)

facili-Two aspects contribute to an effective management of distributed knowledge: an efficient communication/interaction structure (Cohen and Levinthal 1990) and a focused human resources management system (Tsoukas 1996)

Communication can be enabled by creating information channels, which are parts of the social capital and can have a technological or an organiza-tional nature (Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998; Gupta and Govindarajan 2000) The introduction of job rotation is an example of an organizational solu-tion, while intranet and corporate portals are technological tools facilitat-ing the interaction among experts

Many authors have focused their attention on the impact of KMS on performances (Haanes and Lowendhal 1997; Petrash 1996; Roos et al 1997; Schiuma and Marr 2001; Sveiby 1997) The impact on performances

is strongly related to the approach adopted in the KMS (Davenport and Prusak 1998; Wiig 1997) and to the direct impacts on organizational be-haviours in terms of knowledge creation, transfer and capitalization

A fundamental assumption that is common to recent literature is that coordination and decision making do not require knowledge centralization, but rather should provide the access to knowledge (Nonaka 1990) Simple access to knowledge still requires users to have both competency and ca-pacity for understanding, assimilating and using retrieved knowledge In addition, users should also be able to correct possible mistakes (Collins and Kusch 1998), adapt knowledge to the specific problem and complete possible gaps (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995)

More recently, the concept of communities of practice emerged as a key issue Communities of practice consist of people with a joint interest, mu-tual engagement and a shared repertoire; they develop spontaneously out-side the formal organization, can span organizational boundaries, create and are based on relationships (Wenger and Snyder 2000) The concept of

13 Knowledge Sharing in Mobile Work 295

community of practice has a strong potential when applied in the context

of companies having MV workers: by facilitating interaction within munities, a company may reconnect its MV workers to its social and cog-nitive system However, literature on development and management of communities of practice is still based on a few anecdotal contributions based on best practices

com-Overall current literature seems to focus on the problem of coping with knowledge dispersion, rather than on the phenomenon of managing MV workers’ dispersion: in particular, there is a lack of empirical research re-garding its diffusion, characteristics and effects on Knowledge Manage-ment Systems

The chapter is organized as follows: in the next paragraph a framework

is introduced and the methodology for this research is described Then sults are presented and analyzed; limitation of this study and plan for fur-ther research are finally discussed

re-13.2 Research framework and methodology

This contribution is based on the evidence from an empirical research ject which started in 2002 (Corso et al 2004) and aimed at exploring the issue of Knowledge Management in companies characterized by Mobile Virtual Work Our aim is to answer the following research questions: RQ1 Relevance and characteristics of MVW

pro-1 What is the relevance of MVW in Italian companies?

2 What are the characteristics of MVW in Italy?

RQ2 What are the emerging approaches companies use to manage knowledge and their effects on performance in different MVW set-tings?

Funded by the Italian Ministry of Research, the project involved searchers from four universities and started with the development of six case studies that were used to explore the field and develop a framework for further explanatory research

re-The lack of research and especially the lack of empirically grounded analyses on MVW in Italy meant that the investigation had to be divided into three major phases (Fig 13.1):

• T1st research stepT We conducted six explorative cases – not reported here - in order to identify the relevant variables of the phenomenon

Such variables have been used to build the research protocol for the vey.

sur-• T2nd research stepT We developed a two-step survey The first – phonesurvey – measured how relevant mobile work is in Italy (RQ1), whilethe second – paper/electronic survey – analyzes the MV workers’ activi-ties and the KM tools used in the firms, which declared to have Mobileworkers (RQ2) The phone survey was based on a database of 1504large and medium sized companies Sampling was based on 2002 AIDAdatabase (Bureau van Dijk): we were interested in large and mediumsized enterprises in manufacturing industries Out of the 1504 compa-nies contacted 899 answered the survey (59.8% response rate), a samplethat represents a 36% of the overall relevant populationT 1

For the secondstep, the survey sample was made up of the people who declared to haveMobile workers in the first step

Explorative case studies

Variable selection

MVW diffusion and characteristics

Fig 13.1 Research methodology

compa-13 Knowledge Sharing in Mobile Work 297

The Investigation framework (Fig 13.2) was developed starting fromthe analysis of management literature and available results of previous re-search projects Six exploratory cases were conducted to identify the keyvariables that appear to be relevant to understand the phenomenon

KMS

Sharing Generation

Reuse Assimilation

MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS ICT

ORGANIZATIONAL MECHANISMS INTRA & INTER FIRM

PERFORMANCES

- Profitability

- Customer satisfaction

- Worker satisfaction Capitalisation

Transfer MVW PROFILES

Activities

Fig 13.2.TThe investigation framework

Following a contingent approach, the investigation framework assumesthat performances are influenced by KMS, and that KMS effectiveness interms of the ability to produce good performance depends on the internalcoherence among choices (internal consistency) and on the adequacy withthe contingent characteristics (Profiles) of MVW (external consistency).Each group of variables has been analysed and described, based on theresults of exploratory studies For MV worker we referred to the worker who:

• is contractually linked to the firm and can be subjected to control by thefirm and/or coordination

• mainly works outside the firm Employees who are permanently signed work outside the firm (such as, in some cases, the sales agents)and workers who, though having their own site in the firm, mainly workoutside the firm (for example consultants and maintenance people) MVW characteristics were analysed in terms of the type of activity that

as-MV do, e.g sales, maintenance, consulting

We adopted the definition of KM and KMS by Corso et al (2004):

Knowledge Management is about creating an environment that courages people to learn and share knowledge by aligning goals, in-tegrating bits and pieces of information within and across organiza-tional boundaries, and producing new knowledge that is usable anduseful to the organisation

en-The Knowledge Management System is the intended or emerging configuration of technical, organizational and managerial choices (KMS) with which the company influences people’s behaviour in all phases of the knowledge lifecycle, including the acquisition, transfer and sharing, capitalisation and reuse of knowledge KMS support-ing knowledge processes (and their management, for that matter) therefore exist in, and must be designed to fit the internal and exter-nal context of the organisation

Finally, performances were analyzed in terms of:

• business performance (effects on costs and revenues, innovation)

• customer satisfaction (perceived quality of the product/service and all satisfaction)

over-• worker satisfaction (quality of working life and professional growth)

13.3 Field research results

13.3.1 Mapping the MW phenomenon: the survey results

Research question 1: relevance and characteristics of MVW Within the 899 firms which answered the survey, 410 stated that they have

MV workers (45.6%) and provided information about the characteristics of these people and their activities Three main Profiles of MV workers emerged:

• In 47% of the firms the most relevant group of MV workers are bers of the sales force In many cases these people, beside commercial competency, also need technical competency regarding products and are engaged in some form of customer service

mem-• In 35% of the companies MV workers are mainly technicians, such as maintenance people or installers Besides technical knowledge, in many cases, they also require complementary commercial competency

• In the remaining 18% of firms MV workers are managers: researchers, plant directors, inspectors or people responsible for affiliated units

13 Knowledge Sharing in Mobile Work 299Research question 2: KM approaches

This group of 410 companies was then contacted for the second step of the survey, through a questionnaireT 2

• knowledge transfer

− retrieval of knowledge from organizational knowledge storage banks, Ti training on the job, ii in case of problems, workers ii.1 use manuals, ii.2 contact experts, ii.3 use customer/supplier re-cords, ii.4 use project databaseT

− feedback from MV workers to update knowledge domains, ing of knowledge, reports)

(shar-• planning and controlling MVW activities

− MVW activity planning (autonomous vs hierarchical planning)

− MVW activity control (reports, performance measurement, results measurement)

These aspects were used to characterize four emerging Knowledge Management approaches (Table 13.1):

• Products/services innovation orientation Tasks are partially repetitive: retrieval of knowledge is important and frequent, and hence supported

by all the investigated tools In particular, manuals and project databases allow recovery of explicit knowledge, while expert networks support the recovery of tacit knowledge Feedback is important for updating knowl-