Pawlowski & Robey provide a very interesting study on knowledge brokering. This qualitative study brought to light many of the conditions that occur in the real world IT department in a large multi-location corporation. The IT staff does control (and many times hoard) the critical information that revolves around their IT resources and capabilities. My sense is that much of this has to do with fear of replacement or job security.

I would be very interested to see if other research has come about as a result of this article. I am going to have to see the tool Kim used to see how many times this article was cited. I would like to see this research extended to breakdown the different roles within an organization to see how and how much certain job titles broker their knowledge and what affects their behaviors have on the IT and business performance. This is also a potential link into the organizational learning research that could draw on this line of research.

While reading this article I was continually looking for how I would take this research to the next step. What would make this valuable if it was changed to a quantitative study. What elements would be important to quantify? I am certainly looking at these articles differently than I did at the start of the semester.