Data warehousing LO8509

Martin Wood (mwood@ukmkwt.cig.eds.com)
Tue, 16 Jul 1996 10:14:14 +0100

Peter Hornsby <peter.hornsby@bt-sys.bt.co.uk>, wrote in LO8477:

> I'm a student looking at organisational learning in virtual businesses for
> British Telecom in the UK. A colleague recently pointed out to me the
> growth in the market for "data warehousing", and suggested that the
> development of this type of application would seem to provide at least a
> partial answer to the question of how organisations learn. There is much
> more to organisational learning than having a software application to
> collect and distribute information, but having taken a look at this, it
> seems to be a very valid technique for collecting and distributing
> knowledge within an organisation - particularly, for a virtual
> organisation which is based around electronic communications media.

My initial thought was that the key is in the name "data warehousing" - it
stores data not knowledge. You need another layer on the top to extract
and/or identify the knowledge. To take BT as a specific example, it has
built a data warehouse holding metrics of the many software development
projects that it runs. Yet without some intelligent analysis of that
data, BT won't develop any knowledge to gain benefits in how their
projects are run.

> Incorporating such tools into a business seems to be the way to go to
> introduce learning at an organisational level; playing devils advocate for
> a moment, if a business does communuicate a high level of its information
> electronically then this information can be extracted much more easily
> than having the people doing the work engaging in additional tasks. I'd
> appreciate the groups thoughts on this.
>

A danger I see here is to view this technology tool as the *silver bullet*
that will solve all problems. Sure it addresses collecting and presenting
data that would be impossible by manual means, but what about the cultural
dimension ? If "the way we do things round here" does not reflect LO
principles/values/actions (decide for yourself the appropriate word <g>),
then sticking in a data warehouse won't help. And how do you codify
behaviours and attitudes so that they would fit into a digital
representation ?

Martin Wood

-- 
 
Martin Wood - Communications and Media Division, EDS UK
mwood@ukmkwt.cig.eds.com         Tel: +44 1908 284050
The views above are mine, and not necessarily those of EDS
 


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