General framework for organizational learning system.

Anica-Popa, Ionut-Florin

Abstract: The business environment is becoming more and more complex and has started to be knowledge oriented, therefore the organizations are focused on adding value to different data, information and knowledge gathered from their beginning to current days. In recent years, Organizational Memory (OM) has been recognized as one of the most prominent concept for establishing value to organizations and it is perceived within a unified framework of the two concepts of Knowledge Management (KM) and Organizational Learning (OL). This paper presents main concepts and characteristics of organizational knowledge and organizational learning and proposes general architecture for organizational learning system. The goal of this research is to propose a conceptual model of organizational learning system which should be able to identify, extract or create and present useful resources (data, information and knowledge) from organizational memory in order to facilitate the organizational learning process. Limitation and future directions for development of the research are also discussed

Key words: organizational knowledge, organizational memory, organizational learning, knowledge management, learning model

1. INTRODUCTION

Starting with 1990s many researches were conducted to identify, analyze and explain the methods used by organizations collect relevant and useful knowledge from their history in order to obtain a competitive advantage (Walsh and Unguson, 1991; Anand et al., 1998). Development of new methods, models and tools designed to capture, store, and deliver the knowledge in organizational information systems represents the one of the most important issue in the area of knowledge management (Zhao, 1998).

2. ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE

Although the organizational memory has over half of century (Walsh and Unguson, 1991) the organizational science and information-processing theories introduced the concept in the early 1950s the area started to be studied and analyzed in a more consistent way in the last two decades.

The organizational memory can be used in order to minimize the differences between theoretical approach and practical reality related to the social responsibility (Carbonnel, 2008). Organizational memory can be assimilated with a tool that enhance the process of identifying, collecting, converting, storing and evaluating of data, information and knowledge in order to improve the decision-making process for maximizing the organizational performances (Anica-Popa et al., 2010).

Knowledge can be grouped in two categories: explicit and tacit (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995):

* Explicit knowledge is structured, can be coded and included in a document. In many cases, explicit knowledge is in books, tutorials or specific operative procedures. The main characteristics of explicit knowledge are: (i) tangibility; (ii) could be observed during its usage; (iii) simplicity; (iv) schematic; (v) documented.

* Tacit knowledge cannot be coded and it is near impossible to be included in a document or database, because these are inside persons. The main characteristics of explicit knowledge are: (i) intangibility; (ii) could not be observed during its usage; (iii) complexity; (iv) richness; (v) undocumented.

There are four ways of interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995): (i) socialization--the process of creating new tacit knowledge from gathering accumulated experiences; (ii) externalization--the process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge (concepts and/or diagrams) using metaphors or analogies; (iii) combination--process of assembling explicit knowledge in order to obtain new systemic knowledge (in many cases, for obtaining new tangible assets it is necessary to combine existing knowledge with a new concept) and (iv) internalization--the process of transforming explicit knowledge in tacit knowledge (Fig. 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

3. ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

Organizational learning (OL) is a process that must exist in every organization and must "run" continuously because: (a) the individual human mind is limited (requires distributed cognition) and (b) to avoid that organizations get stuck in the status quo and in their own successes. At the same time, organizational learning requires communication, mutual learning and mutual understanding between organization's employees and organization as an entity.

The process of organizational learning has four components (Huber, 1991): (a) knowledge acquisition; (b) information distribution; (c) information interpretation; (d) organizational learning and information systems can generate a major influence over each component.

The objectives of organizational learning are: (a) on the short term: recording knowledge gained through experience; (b) on the long term: making recorded knowledge gained through experience available to organization's employee when it is relevant to their work.

Because the organization represents a social structure made of individuals and groups of individuals, the organizational learning process can be observed at the following levels: (a) individual level which is the simplest form of organizational learning; (b) group level, because the group of individual integrates the existing experience and abilities for learning of each member of the group; (c) organization level which is the core of organizational learning.

The organizational memory (OM) represents one of the central components of organizational learning, being a critical element for learning and communication in organizations (Walsh and Unguson, 1991) an it is characterized by the following aspects: (i) level of organizational memory which represents the amount of stored knowledge an organization has about a particular phenomenon; (ii) distribution of organizational memory which represents information or knowledge distributed and shared among various knowledge retention bins; (iii) dispersion of organizational memory which represents specialization and complementarities which can provide various domains and new knowledge to prevent local learning and enhance capability and (iv) content of organizational memory because there are two types of organizational memory.

4. ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Organizational memory can be assimilated with cartography of organization capitalized knowledge and in order to optimize the access and dissemination of its components, the building process of OM must be based on information and communication technology (Anica-Popa et al., 20l0).

Because data, information and knowledge stored in organizational information system are extremely dynamically, the learning process must be based on the latest resources gathered and stored by the organizational system. In this section we will present a model of an organizational learning system (OLS) based on an architecture consisting of three tiers: (i) learning tier, (ii) logic tier and (iii) resource tier.

The learning tier represents an interface between human and organizational learning system because this tier receives the requests from the user, translate these requests in "OLS language" and invoke the logic tier for resolving the requests. The results received from the system cannot be used by the user until are translated into something that are very similar with human language, this process being accomplished by learning tier also.

The logic tier represents the link between the learning tier and the resource tier the main functionalities of this tier are: gathering the data, information and knowledge from the organizational information system, performing calculation, making evaluations and finally transforming the obtained data into useful information.

The resource tier represents the most valuable component of the organizational learning system, because in this tier are gathered, stored and processed all relevant data, information and knowledge from organization. Generally, any organization has a centralized repository, but there are many cases when each subsidiary can have local repositories. It is necessary to constantly update the centralized repository with data, information and knowledge from each local repository. This tier stores and retrieves resources from all repositories contained by information system of the organization; the resources collected from the resource tier being transmitted to the logic tier for processing.

5. CONCLUSION

This paper presents the main concepts and characteristics of organizational knowledge and organizational learning based on literature review process. In the same time, the study proposes and describes general architecture for organizational learning system.

The most important limitation of the study is related to the depth of user requirements and it is generated by the fact requirements obtained by the study of the literature can be used in order to develop a general architecture, but is not enough for designing, developing and implementing an information system for organizational learning. Therefore the study must be followed with a survey in order to obtain more specific requirements from stakeholders and IT experts.

Another limitation is derived from the fact that the learning process is formed by two phases: (i) assimilation and (ii) evaluation. The current study discusses only the problems related with the extraction and presentation of the relevant resources (data, information and knowledge) from organizational memory to the users, but the organizational learning system must include also a subsystem for evaluating the knowledge "acquired" after the these resources were "assimilated" by the users.

Future research must be focused for developing a mechanism that can evaluate the importance of new acquired knowledge and what is the added value in supporting the process of decision making and, consequently, in the organizational performances.

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The study was conducted within the scientific research project, currently running, financed by The National Research Council (CNCS), Romania, into the framework of National Plan of Research, Development and Innovation--PN II, Ideas Program, 2008 Competition. The title is "Research regarding the modeling of the organizational memory: OMCCAAF, a new methodological framework for the capitalization of the cognitive acquis in the financial and accounting area" (CNCS Id_1866, Contract no. 766/2009; omccaaf.ase.ro).

7. REFERENCES

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