Overview:
Organizational learning is a set of processes by which organizations improve their performance. Performance processes consist of one or more goals, outcome measures, constituent steps, and relevant people, artifacts, and knowledge. Learning processes furthermore require that the organization anticipates and attends to feedback, creates knowledge from that feedback, and takes action based on that knowledge. Relationships among people can be modeled as social networks in which network nodes represent people and network arcs represent relationships (e.g., friendship, advice, supervisor-subordinate relations) that change over time. Social networks also form a resource for collaborative knowledge management: the creation, exchange, and transformation of knowledge. Information technology offers several possibilities for making social networks and collaborative knowledge management more visible, inspectable, and systematic, which may aid the process of organizational learning.
Knowledge management and organizational learning are related. The management of knowledge includes creation and sharing of knowledge, which is a constituent of learning. However, learning also involves the decision to change future action, which is typically considered a outcome of knowledge management.
Key Attributes
Examples
Non-Examples
Formal training
Listenting
Deviance
System thinking
Coaching
Lack of Ability
Shared Experience
Culture
Indifference
Personal Mastery
Integration
Poor environment
Group learning openness Personality
Mental Models
Internet
Perception
Off-job learning
Shared Vision
Mentality
In summary, information technology can support effective organizational learning by providing persistent and well-indexed tools for collaborative knowledge management and social and knowledge network analysis. However, tools are not enough: an organization needs to have some kind of systematic practice that will use the tools appropriately to
Bibliography: Senge, P. M. (1994). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Currency-Doubleday. Star, S. L. (Ed.) (1995). Ecologies of knowledge: Work and politics in science and technology. Buffalo NY: SUNY Press. Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994). Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_knowledge_management Online: http://www.johnsoncontrols.com/content/dam/WWW/jci/be/global_workplace_solutions/global_workplace_innovation/downloads/White_Paper_GMN_ESN_knowledge_management__FINAL.pdf Online guide to building taxonomies: http://knowledgemanagement.ittoolbox.com/documents/ popular-q-and-a/building-a-taxonomy-2056