Understanding the communication and collaboration challenges encountered by technology managers

Raunaque Hasnat,Simon P Philbin

doi:10.1504/ijkms.2021.10034274

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to enhance our understanding of the communication and collaboration challenges encountered by technology managers in their efforts towards efficient knowledge management, eradication of 'shadow IT', and achieving improved rates of project success. The method employed in the research study involved qualitative analysis according to a deductive-inductive approach. This involved semi-structured interviews of practitioners engaged in knowledge management from different industrial sectors. The research identified both primary and secondary factors impacting effective collaboration and communication. The primary factors are culture conflict, visibility, demand resource balance, change management, effective leadership and motivation. The secondary factors are management training, occupational culture differences, aspire to change, autonomy, individualism, communication strategy, competence, lack of common goals, incentive and relatedness.

Highlights

In order to remain competitive industrial companies need to adopt new technologies and the scale and pace of technology acquisition and integration continues to provide significant challenges (Philbin, 2008; Comin, 2016)
The aim of this research is to advance our understanding of the challenges and opportunities for communication and collaboration as part of effective knowledge management, which are encountered by mid-level technology managers in their effort to address the aforementioned issues
Proposition 1 A lack of collaborative and communicative efforts among IT and other functions leads to inefficient knowledge management

Summary

Introduction

In order to remain competitive industrial companies need to adopt new technologies and the scale and pace of technology acquisition and integration continues to provide significant challenges (Philbin, 2008; Comin, 2016). In order to utilise such rapid technological advancements, organisations need to constantly react and adapt to compete in the market. This phenomenon is one the key reasons for firms to rollout large-scale integration programmes, for example, involving adoption of virtual technologies as part of the corporate enterprise system (Klochko and Brizhak, 2017). Industrial companies are pursuing distributed business models, such as through open collaborative networks (Appio et al, 2018) In this context, technology managers face a number of challenges owing to the constant requirements for upgrade-project rollouts, legacy systems management, ensuring effective knowledge management, and coping with demand and supply imbalance (Agarwal and Ferratt, 2002).

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