"How Do You Know That Stuff?": Barriers to Expertise Sharing Among Spreadsheet Users

Spreadsheet collaboration provides valuable opportunities for learning and expertise sharing between colleagues. Expertise sharing practices, in particular, are essential for ensuring that important technical skillsets are retained within organisations, but previous studies suggest that spreadsheet experts often fail to disseminate their knowledge to others. We suggest that social norms and beliefs around the value of spreadsheet use play an important role in user engagement of sharing behaviours. To explore this, we conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with professional spreadsheet users from two separate samples. We find that, in addition to managing potential disruptions with collaborators, sharers must expend effort to adapt highly personalised strategies to often subjective `standards', and to identify the appropriate social timing of sharing. In addition, mixed evaluations of one's own spreadsheet expertise, and dismissive normative beliefs about the value of this knowledge can further deter expertise sharing. These challenges, we suggest, reflect the difficulties of designing for initial and long-term learnability in feature-rich software, and we provide design implications to address these challenges. Overall, our findings demonstrate how the complex interaction between technology design and social dynamics can shape collaborative learning behaviours in the context of feature-rich software.