I am a third year undergraduate currently studying Information Technology,
Business Management and Language at the University of York, UK. I have
just spent a year in industry at Rank Xerox Ltd where I worked on some of
their Organisational Learning programmes, and subsequently the area of my
third year research project is 'Information Technology tools to support
Learning Organisations'. I chose to research this specific area of
organisational learning as it seems to me (correct me if I am wrong) to be
an area that is fairly under-researched.
I am looking forward to participating in some interesting discussions but
I also have some questions.
Does anyone have any experience of what IT tools are being used by
organisations to support organisational learning? I realise that our
host, Richard Karash, has presented some work on groupware, I have read
the discussion on a design methodology for a company-wide e-mail system
(LO 10999), and I believe other technology in use to be case-based
reasoning tools and best practice databases but does anyone have any other
ideas? I am particularly interested in whether the consultants who are
contributors to this dialog recommend to organisations any kind of
technology to support organisational learning.
Another area that I have been looking at features in chapter 17 of Senges
'The Fifth Discipline'. In this chapter Senge talks about 'Microworlds',
computer simulations that represent business situations. He recommends
that organisations use these to test out the effects of different
variables on a situation so that the discovered outcome can be reflected
upon and learned from before the same situation occurs in the 'real
world'. Does anyone have any experience of the use of microworlds in
organisations? In what kind of situations are they being used?
Finally I have one more request. As part of my project I am investigating
what IT tools are currently being used by organisations to support
organisational learning by distributing a short postal questionnaire. Are
there any members of organisations out there who could complete my
questionnaire for me about how their organisation is aspiring to become a
'Learning Organisation' and the IT tools being used?
If anyone is interested in the results of this survey I will be happy to
send them a copy.
[Host's Note: Welcome Helen! Anyone interested in participating in
Helen's survey, please contact her directly. Helen mentions my article on
"Groupware and Org Learning" which is at
http://world.std.com/~rkarash/GW-OL/
... Rick]
I look forward to reading your responses.
Helen Webb
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Helen Webb
Department of Computer Science
University of York
e-mail:hw-a@itbml.cs.york.ac.uk
tel: +1904 414362
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
--"HELEN WEBB" <hw-a@itbml.cs.york.ac.uk>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>