A social simulation-game to explore future co-ordination in knowledge networks at the Amsterdam Police Force

The 32 autonomous neighbourhood teams of the Amsterdam Police Force need to utilise each other's knowledge and expertise to deal with the variety and complexity of their daily work assignments. However, despite the creation of organisation wide knowledge networks, communication, co-ordination and knowledge sharing between the neighbourhood teams is disappointing. We conducted an action research to investigate how co-ordination in the knowledge networks could be improved with the help of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This article reflects on the choice of co-ordination perspectives and modelling techniques. The above problem is conceptualised and made operational in different ways in research on network co-ordination, knowledge co-ordination and co-ordination of distributed work. The article demonstrates how our initial focus on capturing quantitative measures of the co-ordination problem in a computer simulation was problematic in this case. Instead a social simulation-game that focused on the qualitative issues of this co-ordination problem was developed and played. We conclude that the choice of theoretical perspectives and modelling techniques strongly affected the results of both phases of our action research. Furthermore the article argues that more attention to qualitative issues in co-ordination is required to better understand the impact of ICT-support on co-ordination.