ON THE USE OF BOUNDARY OBJECTS IN

The development of proprietary information systems has been and continues to be a very complex activity marked by few successes and clamorous failures. During the last two decades information system development (ISD) methodologies have emerged that consider the development process as a process of social construction of the system’s goals rather than a process of discovery of the system’s requirements. With this “novel” view, it has become very important to address the specific issue of how to facilitate this process of social construction. The agreement is that using software prototypes as mediators for knowledge exchange represents the best bet for the system ’ stakeholders to achieve this goal. However questions arise regarding what are the characteristics of these prototypes, what is the process within which they have to be used, and what is the genre of communication to be used in order to support the creation of knowledge. This article addresses these questions adapting to ISD the ideas about boundary objects coming from the literature on new product development and the ideas about the creation of knowledge coming from recent studies on the pragmatic nature of knowledge. It is shown that in order for prototypes to behave as boundary objects they have to be visual, usable, bi-directional, and up-to-date. While two cases support these claims they also point at a broader view of boundary objects indicating that the development process itself can act as a boundary object. This discovery opens new questions about the nature of knowledge boundary and the locus and dynamics of knowledge exchanges