I just signed up for this list yesterday, and wow! This is an active one.
I have recently been appointed to a "Cross-Functional Site Team" for a
division in my department (AISS) at the University of Illinois. I don't
want to go into just how byzantine the bureaucracy of our organization as
a whole (the U of I) is, but suffice it to say that the division is
several dozen employees in an organization that employs thousands. As far
as where I stand on the food chain, well, it's the bottom rung, though
we're all professionals, so it's not as "bottom" as it might be if it were
a factory. This "cross-functional site team" is tasked with finding ways
to make several teams/groups within the division cooperate as a
division-level team rather than competing, hiding information from each
other, passing the buck and so on... In other words, we're to find ways to
make organizational change bubble up from the bottom. Our immediate
management is supportive of the need for organizational change, but I
don't know just how high up this goes.
So, from this standpoint, I'm interested in learning what can be done by
people at the bottom of the food chain to be "change agents" -- or does
the theory of learning organizations just address management?
I also do a bit of work with Lotus Notes, and I've read some things about
how groupware can help in bringing about organizational change... I'm
interested in general with what role technology can play in bringing
people together to be more productive. Most applications are designed to
help one person be more productive, but don't address that the projects we
work on need to have a *team* of people be more productive. The whole can
be greater than the sum of the parts, and I'm interested in learning about
how technology has been used to help the whole rather than just the parts.
-- Joan Schraith Cole <a href=http://ux1.cso.uiuc.edu/~jcole> Administrative Information Systems and Services at the University of Illinois Client Support Services Consultant (217) 333-4097 jcole@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu OR jcole2@joker.aiss.uiuc.edu