Scaffolding knowledge sharing and decision support in distributed web-based systems: a socio-technical perspective

The competitiveness of distributed organizations is critically linked to their ability to make sense of distributed knowledge and integrate it rapidly into the decision-making process. This underpins the ability to develop new opportunities to respond to emerging problems, and to avoid recurring ones. In this context, the authors discuss the concerns of managers across different supply chain sectors as they move from a focus on the inter-operability of technical and business processes, to a focus on “semantic inter-operability”. They outline a proposal for a web-based interface tool to scaffold knowledge sharing across distributed communities, building on the potential to make the social architecture of “soft” processes more tangible across distributed groups. This is identified as part of a trend towards building technology around the social processes that mediate knowledge sharing, generation and implementation, in open systems such as grid-based web-services.