How organizational project roles interact with CAD technology changes : an exploratory case study of a Middle Eastern engineering design firm

Abstract

Prior (ethnographic and qualitative) research on organization-technology change has provided us with insights into professional role changes that take place as the organization transitions from one work technology configuration to another. Barley’s (1986, 1990) work on introduction of new digital medical imaging into two hospitals is foundational from this perspective. As the economy and society have become more knowledge-intensive, the rhetoric-hype about the knowledge work is all around us. However, this hype has rarely been matched by research that is grounded in the reality of knowledge work and the concomitant role-procedure changes—to inform management research and policy. Furthermore, two aspects of the underlying phenomena have been under-explored: engineering technical settings and Middle Eastern organizational practices. This MBA project addresses the above gap in research including the engineering setting and Middle Eastern context. We analyze how the role and knowledge content changes of Engineers and Technicians at a major regional firm (Alpha Middle Eastern Engineering) is transitioning from employing AutoCAD® to using Revit® in its drafting and design practices—AutoCAD software has a traditional structure consisting of points, lines and polygons while Revit’s structure is object-oriented consisting of design objects (e.g. doors, junction boxes, circuits, roofs, etc.). This analysis reveals three distinctive patterns of knowledge content and role change due to the transition: knowledge mixing; task-work load change; and role-knowledge-stickiness. First, we observed a pattern of knowledge mixing among the engineer and draftsperson role. The engineers appeared to have taken on to do some of what draftspersons used to do, while draftspersons are taking on to do what engineers used to do. Second, task-work load of engineers has increased while the draftspersons’ task-work load has decreased. Third, there is increased role-knowledge-stickiness to the draftsper