RCHITECTURE FOR ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING

Learning Organisation is an organisation that purposefully takes steps to create architecture to enhance and maximize the potential for explorative and exploitative organizational learning to take place.

Team-Based Structure - Teams are the best way of mixing energy with experience and for any organisation teams are good sources of attaining targets effectively and efficiently.

Team based structures support continuous learning and pooling of experience and sharing knowledge. Looking at these benefits, a team-based structure is necessary for any organization aiming to become a learning organisation.

Empowered Employees - Employee empowerment will make sure that employee take full responsibility for their actions and they work in an open environment this will also facilitate growth of employees and encourage innovation as well as instills the ability to think out of the box. Empowered employees will take more initiative & they will try to solve the problem where and when it will arise; this makes organizational climate more conducive to learning.

Open Information - Information should be provided to everyone. Transparency in decision-making must be maintained. Open information builds trust and confidence of employees in the management and reduces the employee-management conflict. It also leads to pooling & sharing of experience and mutual learning. Even information considered obsolete or rudimentary may turn out to be of importance and may result into organizational growth.

The Linkages Team based structure, empowered employees and open information all coexist and they are linked with each other as essentials. The team structure will facilitate sharing of common resources and objectives. Overall performance of the team or group will depend upon total of performances of each individual as well as team will make a coordinated effort to attain its targets or to perform effectively and efficiently. No organization can empower its employees with out sharing information with them so to empower employees the organization has to share information with employees and this connects open information with empowered employees. Employees who have information and who also posses the power to act and decide will definitely try their level best to improve the performance of the organization also they will be open towards learning & information

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sharing. Over and above these elements, the most important ingredient for a learning organization is Knowledge Management- being able to capitalize on the knowledge members of the organization. The knowledge or enriched experience that might not be written down or codified in formal documents. As employees do their jobs, they gain knowledge about the tasks they perform and learn the best ways to get certain things done and solve specific problems. Through knowledge management, this information can be shared and used by other employees working in the same organization. Certainly, the people performing a certain job are likely to learn the most about it. Knowledge management seeks to share this learning and knowledge throughout an organization.

Middle-Down-Up Management

An integrative architectural framework that unites the concepts of learning organization and knowledge management is presented for the readers to get a meaningful view. The model, depicted in Figure 3.1, is based on Senge’s five

“disciplines” of learning organizations:

1. Systems Thinking. A conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.

2. Personal Mastery. The discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.

3. Mental Models. Deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.

4. Building Shared Vision. The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared “pictures of the future” that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance.

5. Team Learning. The discipline of team learning starts with “dialogue,” the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine “thinking together”.

Figure 3.1 Middle-Down-Up Management.

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Learning occurs at three levels: individual (personal mastery), group (team learning), and organizational (building shared vision). Mental models underlie all learning. They can either impede it by going unnoticed or accelerate it by being reflected, surfaced and examined. On the other, learning may change mental models. The fifth discipline, Systems Thinking, integrates the other four by enhancing each of them.

Adapting the middle-up-down management process of Nonaka and Takeuchi, let us propose middle-down-up approach. In this framework, middle managers play an important role by working as a “bridge” between the broad visions of the top management and the concrete realities of business that front-line employees confront. They figure out the strategic intentions of the top management and translate them into a conceptual framework comprehensible to their subordinates. By signaling their own priorities, assumptions, and ways of thinking and acting, leaders manifest espoused values. These conscious and explicitly articulated values, however, are not necessarily internalized by the organization but remain to be questioned, debated, and challenged in dialogue, until the team has a shared perception of the success based on these values, and the value goes through a process of cognitive transformation into a belief and, ultimately, and assumption. In this leadership process, the images and maps of the conceptual framework are then incorporated into organizational theory-in-use, and explicit knowledge is internalized into tacit knowledge.

When people share common mental models congruent with the shared vision, they can be empowered: they will know how to operate in various business settings as long as the overall business reality remains invariant. On the contrary, “to empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive”. Shared vision emerges from the personal visions of individuals in the management process, in which the mental models are manifested on the surface of the organizational culture, and the tacit knowledge is externalized into explicit knowledge.

Revisiting this model, Figure 3.2 depicts how the levels of enterprise architecture correspond to the model.

Figure 3.2 Organizational Learning and Enterprise Architecture

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On the strategic level, business activity is monitored (BAM) through the management process, exposing organizational theory-in-use, or actual behavior, in the form of real-time management dashboards facilitating strategic decision-making. The shared vision of the organization is built as a steering process of external adaptation and internal integration.

The output of this process is the new and revised models describing the business processes on the highest level. Simulation capabilities are also employed as the means of optimizing the processes.

The tactical level is about coordination and associated with team learning. The strategic intent of the top management is translated to unique end-to-end core business processes. These processes can be configured by composing underlying context-independent services and coordinating the interplay of executable processes. Choreography is the prevalent means to describe relatively static collaborative processes; new concepts are emerging to address more dynamic collaborations. This is where the team learning occurs: the coordination of the collaborative effort requires a significant amount of dialogue between the process participants. Team learning also has an effect on tacit knowledge within the organization through the leadership process.

The operational level embraces the operational and information model of the organization in the form of services. The services are context-independent, idempotent faculties optimized to perform their predefined function. Typically, orchestration describes the sequence and conditions in which the service accesses underlying resources, binding them to its execution context. Thus this level corresponds to personal mastery: the purpose of orchestration is to optimize resource utilization and streamline service efficiency against some performance measure defined by the management process.

The model reflects the reality as perceived by the organization. It is the vast repository of “sources of truth” dispersed in enterprise information systems and databases, the knowledge of the organization. Thereby, it can be equated to mental models in the Middle-Down-Up model.

In document DBA 1735 Knowledge Management (Page 98-101)