Having read that series of papers, I feel like a fruitful avenue of research would be applying the knowledge management framework to the question of how user research insights can better inform strategic decisions.
A study of the type of “knowledge” user research insights represents could help flesh out the shape of how to best share those insights. Are user research insights fully encoded in interviews and reports or do they exist more fully as tacit knowledge in the heads of user researchers. When working at Bolt Peters, one thing we found anecdotally was that clients who sat in and observed user testing sessions were better partners, seemed more receptive to our recommendations and in general seemed to “get it.” On the other hand, the process, in my experience, definitely generates its share of documents.
If user research is tacit, then that would imply, based on the Hanson and Haas paper on knowledge management, that such information would:
- Need to be shared through personal interaction
- Would impact the quality of work done — in this case the quality of strategic decisions made
- Barriers that would have to be overcome are:
- Tacitness of knowledge: in this case leading to difficulty in transfer, since it must be transfered via personal interaction
- Limited absorptive capability by receiver: manager jokes aside, there is probably a limit on the amount of tacit knowledge that can be passed. Might this be a theoretical justification for having decision-makers regularly rub shoulders with their customers or, more modernly, sit in on or directly view ethnographic-type interviews?
- Lack of trust between receiver and provider
It will be interesting to try to do some research in a company with this perspective in mind.
