Organizational Information Culture and Technology Artefacts

Organizational information culture can be defined as the behavioural norms and values shown by employees towards information. Researching enterprise search technology artefacts that represent aspects of the culture in which they are deployed, some organizations may not score highly in supporting an information culture that enables innovation and creativity. In addition to mapping information cultures through observation, surveys and interviews, there may be opportunities to infer aspects of culture through abductive reasoning based on the nature of technology artefacts (or absence of them). Its a work-in-progress, I’ve adapted Choo’s (2013) and Cameron and Quinn’s (2011) typology as applied to enterprise search.

I have kept Choo’s dimensions on the y-axis and four typology descriptions, adding my own text in red to describe the relationships to technology artefacts and x-axis related to enterprise search and discovery capability continuum (information ‘containers’ versus entities/concepts) building on the ‘modality model’. The presence or absence of technologies (or aspects of technology features) may imply certain information cultures (that have been inscribed into the technology).