Collaborative Technology in the Learning Organization: Integrating Process with Information Flow, Access, and Interpretation1
L. Levine Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213 US, Tel. (412) 268-3893, Fax (412) 268-5758,
[email protected], I. Monarch Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213 US, Tel. (412) 268-7070, Fax (412) 268-5758,
[email protected]
Realizing organizational learning in practice has not and will not happen by itself. In this paper, we recommend that for organizational learning to become part of daily work, collaborative technology must be integrated with evolving technical and business processes. New communities of practice and consortia must be nurtured, which include people and organizations experienced and knowledgeable in collaboration technology, organizational learning, and process initiation and improvement. We point to the importance of distinguishing between learning at the individual level and learning at the organizational level and describe how the latter might be realized. In closing, we outline a technology transition approach reliant on collaboration technology that we are beginning to define and pilot at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University 1
(CMU). This approach explores the concept of distance affiliation and emerging roles for Institute staff and our affiliate partners.
Over the last several decades, organizations that specialize in technological innovation, including technical knowledge and expertise, have experienced two important developments. These developments, emphasizing the roles of processes and knowledges have evolved, in parallel, but more or less separately. On the one hand, the process movement has favored a trend toward establishing fairly formal business and work processes in order to ensure that highly technical work gets done on time, within budget, and with quality assured and customer satisfaction maintained (Humphrey, 1997; Heineman et al, 1994; Curtis, Kellner & Over, 1992). In a sense, the emphasis on processes represents an important modification and
This work is sponsored by the Department of Defense.
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extension of principles of Taylorism and Fordism; though while more flexible and adaptive, the new approach still remains largely managerial and control oriented (Suchman 1993). However, the seeds of organizational democracy reside in a process focus that finds a mean between discipline and innovation, hearing the multiplicity of voices and resisting exclusionary interests. Defining work processes has made inroads into practice over the last 10 years and, in limited ways, now extends to include process modeling, simulation and automation, as understood in the context of the organization’s larger business processes (Heineman et al, 1994; Christie et al, 1996; Curtis, Kellner & Over, 1992). In parallel, a second trend in response to the challenge of the coming of the knowledge society (Drucker, 1993), has seen the creation of knowledge-based organizations (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), as being greatly enhanced by integration of quickly evolving information technology (Seybold, 1992a, Seybold, 1992b). Advances in information technology specifically directed toward organizational knowledge and learning, dating back to the 1960s and visions like Doug Engelbart’s, have provided a revolutionary opportunity for information technology as a medium for facilitating and improving group communication and knowledge creation. Rapid advances have continued (Englebart & Lehtman, 1988; Englebart, 1992; Sybold, 1992a; Seybold, 1992b). Presently, IBM (Lotus Notes), Microsoft and Netscape (Intranets and Extranets) are gearing up to capture a huge projected market based on the use of the World Wide Web (WWW). Products that enable conferencing and brainstorming at a distance, as well as multimedia information capture, structuring, visualization and retrieval are already available at fairly minimal costs. Such
products extend Engelbart’s views of the potential of computer technology even further. We maintain that local adjustments within both of these movements are necessary. Within the process arena, it is time to counter-balance process formalization with process creation by leveraging individual knowledge through information exchange and reconciling diverse perspectives. An organization that supports information sharing and knowledge creation amongst its members and has a commitment to inclusion through presentation, negotiation, and reconciliation of multiple viewpoints is likely to establish effective and efficient processes as well as to improve organizational life. Within the knowledge creation arena, we must grapple with a need to filter and channel information (without loss) for knowledge-based decision-making. Information technology has in some cases made matters worse by exacerbating information overload (in the form of email glut, for example) rather than realizing knowledgebased organizations in practice. Far behind the rapid evolution of the technology that we have described are approaches for its use in enacting knowledge-based and learning organizations. These necessary local adjustments within the process-based and knowledge-based movements pave the way for a more dramatic synthesis since organizational learning is dependent upon the integration of processes and knowledge creation in both theory and practice. The operational means for the application of this learning rests on identifying the information intensities in processes and then addressing these potential fault lines with improved processes using collaboration technology--the guideposts coming from the discipline of organizational learning itself. We believe that in order to make learning organizations an everyday reality, it will be
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necessary to leverage the experience and successes of putting information sharing, knowledge creation, and work processes into practice. To date, work flow research and practice has focused on business processes and process enactment technologies. This paradigm fails to fully appreciate the chaotic aspects, but potential richness of, information flows in the workplace. Until process automation taps these information flows, and is aligned with information sharing and knowledge creation technologies, its potential will be limited to quick fixes, partial solutions, and inadequately informed decision making. When we use the phrase “collaborative technology,” we mean such an alignment between process and information-sharing technologies. In this paper, we emphasize the need for nurturing new communities of practice, including people and organizations experienced and knowledgeable in collaboration technology, organizational learning, and process initiation and improvement. Most importantly, those familiar with the workings of processes in their local situations must be involved. In closing, we outline a technology transition approach, one that is reliant on collaboration technology, that we are beginning to define and pilot at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). This approach explores the concept of distance affiliation and emerging roles for Institute staff and our affiliate partners. A comment on why such an approach is critical to how the SEI does its work is in order. The development of frameworks for software technology transition and approaches such as distance affiliation have grown out of the need to serve the mission of the SEI, a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), located at Carnegie Mellon University. Its mission—to advance the state of software engineering practice—requires a
transition strategy that will meet the needs of SEI customers. These customers include: U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) contractors; military services; government agencies such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); large and small software vendors who serve these organizations; large corporations such as AT&T and Hewlett Packard whose businesses are softwareintensive; and academic and industrial providers of education and training. As national security concerns broaden to include competitiveness issues, the constituencies served by the SEI are also extended. The goal of the Institute is to help customers make lasting improvements in their ability to acquire, develop, and maintain softwaredependent systems, and in their ability to educate people to perform these activities effectively. Currently, the SEI is constrained by charter to 250 members of the technical staff, while the population addressed by the SEI transition effort includes hundreds of thousands of technical professionals, their managers, and the academic and continuing education community.2 Three key strategies provide the SEI with this leverage: information dissemination and outreach activities, partnerships, and infrastructure development. The concept of distance affiliation serves all three strategies, and represents one way to realize our mission of technology transition under the auspices of organizational learning—on the part of the Institute and its collaborators and clients.
2
For more information on the SEI’s conceptual framework for software technology transition, and for an explanation of strategies and mechanisms that serve them, see Fowler & Levine 1993.
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` ` Approaches to organizational learning starting in the late 1970s (Argyris & Schon, 1978) have generated significant interest, but such discussion has not yet led to widespread application. Many of these ideas have not been piloted or implemented in everyday work practices of organizations (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995); nor has the body of knowledge tapped advances in information technology to create a sense of learning history or corporate memory, except in highly innovative business environments. Researchers and practitioners have been writing on this topic for decades, and yet issues debated in the field twenty or so years ago bear a striking resemblance to those still debated today. For example, we continue to discuss distinctions between adaptive and generative learning (Senge, 1990), between single and double loop learning (Argyris, 1976; Argyris & Schon, 1996), between "know how" and "know why," and so on. How is it that organizational learning has persisted, running parallel to the stream of "hot" fads in business and management practice? The concept has survived, even if it has slept occasionally, while a whole cadre of consultants and organizational mechanics have paraded by selling everything from management by objectives, quality circles, total quality management, and management by results to statistical process control, business process reengineering, business process reinvention, and most recently high performance teams, selfdirected teams, empowered teams, and integrated product (or process, or practice) teams. Is organizational learning just a catch-all, a vessel, for goals and related thinking on
strategy, productivity, and innovation? Perhaps organizational learning holds true “generically” and the variation that we see resides in methods, techniques, and practices--the means for instantiating some kind of organizational learning. The question then remains: is the staying power of organizational learning in its emptiness or elasticity? Have we advanced in this area over the last three decades or not, and if so, how or how not? To add to the fuzziness around the concept of organizational learning, researchers and practitioners also talk about "learning organizations."3 For some, the difference is captured between "Organizational Learning (OL) by which we typically mean learning by individuals and groups IN the organization vs. Learning Organization (LO) by which we mean learning BY the organization as a total system (Schein, 1997, p.1; in reference to Lundberg, 1991). By the organization as a total system, we mean that there are systemic features to learning beyond the activities of particular individuals (who may come and go). This does not mean that people are not important or needed in the learning process; but rather organizational learning is not reducible to individual learning. Some writing on the topic uses these terms interchangeably, and so care must be taken with interpretation. In this paper, we are concerned with the second—learning organizations—and we preserve and follow the distinction outlined above. We envision a learning organization as one where •
the organization remembers and learns
3
Researchers have interpreted the notion of a learning organization positively (Schein, 1997) and negatively, because of a concern with reification (Simon, 1991).
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• •
•
•
public recording is unobtrusive and useful in the execution of work processes and decision making principles and concepts may refer to a group, and organizational unit/s, or a community, thus suggesting notions of scalability and tailoring with respect to a group or larger unit, the notion of learning is different from an additive definition of the group as the sum of individual a + b +n learning is applied to produce or modify individual dispositions, policies, processes, and procedures
We believe that we are now poised, more ready than ever, for learning organizations. We are at a watershed—with the potential to leverage our intellectual investment in organizational learning, matching our interests with enabling information technology. Current thinking in the discipline of organizational learning, itself, offers guidelines for use. However, because of the limitations already noted, we emphasize that constructing learning environments requires that we appeal to knowledge and capability in related areas, such as: processes and systems thinking, group dynamics and performance, distance learning, and community memory. Together, these comprise the backbone for communication and cooperative work necessary for a learning organization.
Group dynamics & performance Community memory
Processes
Distance learning
Collaboration technology
Figure 1. Organizational Learning domain model. Too often, we observe a premature inclination to jump to a technological solution without attending to the basics. For example, development teams may be over eager to automate processes, which have not been fully defined or used in manual operations (Christie et al, 1996). Similarly, "doing" computer supported cooperative work does not guarantee that contributors are collaborating, in the best sense of the word, or working productively as a team. Such tendencies reveal wishful thinking that the addition of technological support will magically allow participants to leap frog multiple interdependent requirements. Thus, the technology can be seen, naively, as a silver bullet, allowing one to conveniently sidestep consideration of the primary ingredients associated with effective work practice. Certainly, the new work mode or environment may turn out to be substantially different than a present baseline operation. However, failure to account for what constitutes good practice as a starting point, only guarantees compromised success at the next technological level of complexity. No technology can compensate for bad practice, nor can it substitute for an understanding of fundamentals; however,
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integrating, experimenting with, and piloting new technologies in practice can help co-evolve both fundamentals and technologies. For all of these reasons, we underscore the importance of related knowledge in several disciplines and in local practices. Initially, one may focus on collaboration technology and thinking about systems and processes. In the end, a learning organization must reckon with good practice in teaming, education, sharing information and archiving lessons, and corporate memory —recording and analyzing decision making and related history—for recurring and problematic themes, and all in a manner that is coherent, yet streamlined and accessible. A last point is worth pausing over. All organizations inevitably enter this problem space from somewhere: with prior knowledge and experience in many of the areas identified. Local understanding may be fragmented or isolated but it represents organizational learning, even if that learning is somewhat sparse or dislocated. In many organizations, learning efforts have simply not been conceived of strategically, or with any intent for integration. This may have occurred for any number of reasons, including the relative immaturity of the technologies in question and risks associated with the same. At the SEI, for example, we have experimented with an empowered team, and endeavored to distill necessary knowledge and practices for chartering teams and start up. We have conducted preliminary experiments with groupware under the auspices of characterizing the role of knowledge integration in software development and engineering. The Institute’s education program, and masters program in software engineering, directly employed its media studio for the offering of courses by satellite. Some interest has more recently been expressed in the development of CD ROMs for application in just-in-time learning, in an
environment that might incorporate the notion of shared virtual space, a library of process assets, and other repositories. Other efforts have involved research on process automation and its use. Unfortunately, we have not conceived of these disparate efforts strategically, to the extent that they comprise the building blocks for creating a learning organization. Indeed, we might argue that this paper represents a discussion piece for beginning to focus attention, within the SEI, on the necessity of this topic: on the need to realize our intellectual investments and our organizational learning, if we are to become an organization which learns. In the following sections on integrating process and collaborative information technology, we sketch how these two bodies of knowledge and practice can be aligned. Many software engineering processes such as requirements elicitation, analysis, and specification, risk identification and mitigation, and domain analysis, (all contributing to process assessment and improvement) are information-intensive processes that benefit from enlisting the voices of participants across the organization. In addition, tapping the voices of others involved—suppliers, subcontractors, and customers—is vital. In some cases, these processes may be well-formulated or successful in practice, however, discussion about their continuing evolution can be plagued by hierarchical organizational structures that thwart communication and learning. Alternative structures, processes of communication, and technological support for the same may be usefully explored. This is the subject of the next section. In addition, we describe, in broad strokes, a pilot technology transition approach that will enable a client organization to engage in distance affiliation with the SEI.
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U A learning organization establishes the capability to understand its milieu, including its current activities and work processes—to evaluate what is understood, and to initiate improvements where necessary. Somewhat paradoxically, these metaprocesses centered on the capability to learn are both independent of and dependent on the people in an organization. What is critical is that this capability enables decision making and effects outcomes, representing the combined experience, expertise, and knowledge of all participants, involved in a group activity. Group activities, in this regard, may pertain to a team, project, program, department, etc. In such an enterprise, a strong leader may be best able to summarize or express the voice of the group, but what is being expressed is the product of uninhibited information flow, analysis, and negotiation. We emphasize that our goal in this paper is to support organizational dialogue; it remains for the organization, itself, to find its own medium and voice.4 Organizations are independent of the people who are their members in that work processes (along with associated policies, mores, mechanisms, and techniques) may exist long after people have left the organization or before new people have come onboard. Moreover, viable and effective processes are not dependent on extraordinary individuals to carry them out. Organizations with a strong process focus are in 4
We believe that all forms of organizations are capable of learning—although the modes in which learning occurs will likely be different. Such an inquiry is beyond the scope of this paper, but represents an intriguing line of future research. We might ask, for example, how does learning vary, in its existence and expression, in enabling and coercive bureaucracies (Adler, 1996)? How do different organizational paradigms—random, open, synchronous, and closed—(Constantine, 1993) affect learning?
this regard potentially democratic. By mobilizing multiple perspectives, experiences, and expertise from all across an organization, and channeling these for decision making, the organization, as a whole, can monitor relevant market conditions, continuously adapting its processes to satisfy changing technical and business needs. By the same token, an organization’s culture and the identity of its members derive, in part, from these articulated processes. They determine the quality of life and the loyalty of members, and must be adjusted continuously to gain and keep the commitment of the organization’s members. Organizations are dependent on their members in that it is the free flow of ideas and interaction of individuals that form the creative source for organizational learning—and are necessary conditions for the ongoing viability of the processes that are created. A number of researchers have pointed to the importance of “talk” and “interaction” as a basis for mutual understanding and intelligibility (Bannon & Kuutti, 1996), for narrative exchanges as the basis of learning-in-working and innovation (Brown & Duguid, 1991), and of records, documents, visualizations, and artifacts to accomplish work and to engender shared ways of viewing the world (Suchman, 1987; Brown & Duguid, 1996; Schein, 1995). Talk, stories, and documents serve a dual role, for information bearing and for social bonding—in single, isolated instances and also in multiple, connected instances throughout an organization, and through time. Talk may be face to face or distributed, and synchronous or asynchronous. In order for such talk among members of different projects or programs to contribute to the same discussion or to branching threads, most organizations will have to undergo cultural and structural changes in order to reap the potential benefits. These changes cannot not happen overnight, which is just as well, for it is
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unwise for organizations to attempt such unilateral changes all at once. Collaborative information technologies can support the dual functionality of human expression, through as unobtrusive a means as possible, by enabling various discussion threads to be tracked as they are carried out. Systems such as Ventana’s GroupSystems5 and Corporate Memory Systems’ QuestMap, might help with the elicitation, capture, and initial structuring of information. Other tools using various automated and semi-automated text processing mechanisms allow content analysis of the contents of electronic brainstorming output (Orwig, 1997), electronic mail, computer-based bulletin board systems, information repositories including the ACM’s database of indexed articles (Callon et al., 1986; Coulter et al., 1996), SEI process and risk findings (Monarch & Gluch, 1995), and verbatim survey data. The latter findings strive to capture talk across many organizations, both governmental and commercial, and across divisions of organizations. This talk has an implicit structure that can be made more explicit by the combined work of multiple collaborators interacting with text processing software. Processes integrating these collaborative information technologies with groups engaged in creating practical engineering knowledge are being developed at SEI and CMU (Monarch et al., 1997). These processes and technologies can speed up the identification of areas where working agreements can be developed for productive decision making. Tools, alone, will not create the organizational cultures, structures, and conditions that are needed for their best use. Rather, the necessary mutual adaptation of the technology and organizational processes and forms must come 5
For information about Ventana’s GroupSystems, visit their web site at http://www.ventana.com
through trial and experimental use (Leonard Barton, 1988a; Leonard-Barton, 1988b). In the next section, we describe the role of a learning forum and steps that the SEI is considering to co-evolve processes for technology transition through the use of collaboration technology under the rubric of organizational learning. The learning organization represents a new level of capability. This new level of capability can be attained if the plurality of voices in an organization cum machine network can be brought to bear on decision making— simultaneously producing a history that becomes a basis for learning in an organization. New organizational structures and processes can be envisioned that integrate work with collaborative information technology to reach the level of capability that the learning organization aspires to. While many factors needed for the transition to learning organizations are now in place, the radicality of the change required will create significant resistance. This resistance will slow transition, sometimes in necessary and positive ways (Levine, 1997) and may even circumvent the development of learning organizations where conditions are not conducive. Organizations that jump from trend to trend lack the patience necessary for this transition. Given the tenuous evolution to learning organizations, building a community wide support system—to actively provide products and services that jump-start this transition—is probably a necessity. Significant benefit can be drawn from establishing and maintaining learning forums where experiences of success and failure can be collected, organized, generalized, and disseminated. Such forums can also mobilize and dedicate resources and funds for the investigation, piloting, and evaluation of
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new processes and technologies that can be brought to the attention of the whole community. Schein (1997) demonstrates a similar need in his discussion on transformational learning. He observes that academics “write about and lecture about....ideas” [often tied to an observation from practice] that “a small number of practitioners catch on or recognize... But most of them misunderstand or misapply the ideas until they are ready to embed them in their organizations.” Soon after, the commercial consulting community recognizes the potential...[and] if they sense practitioner interest, they develop education and training programs to embed the ideas in their client organizations.” However, the process of commercialization brings inevitable standardization, making the ideas inapplicable to the particular organization’s situational context. Finally, communities of practice (Brown & Gray, 1995; Brown & Duguid, 1991; Schein 1997) come into play; and here a “learning consortium” emerges. “The learners in the local community of practice recognize the need for new learning but must find teachers and coaches who can appreciate the nuances of their situation, yet who are not caught up in their local operator culture.” Schein concludes that if “learning only occurs in a community of practice, and if transformational learning involves changing of some cultural assumptions, it must be mediated by a consortium of practitioners who provide to each other the support and insight that only a fellow practitioner could provide and, at the same time, an outsider perspective that permits local cultural assumptions to be surfaced and examined” (pp. 6-7). The mission of the SEI is to improve the state of the practice of software engineering in order to effect technology transition. Envisioning a role of the SEI as a learning consortia, or an
equivalent forum where new processes and technologies are explored and applied, is a clear match to realizing its mission and for addressing the learning needs of the software community. In the following discussion, we expand upon this model and propose an initial vehicle for community-based, cooperative learning, through distance affiliation. Building a community of learning organizations
The conditions for creating learning organizations are now more propitious than ever. An increasing number of organizations are defining and evolving work processes. Activity at the SEI has contributed to these developments in the domain of software engineering and, as a consequence, the SEI has accumulated substantial expertise and experience for establishing and improving software engineering processes across a wide spectrum of organizations. In addition, advances in collaborative information technology specifically directed toward knowledge and learning are maturing and becoming available over the Internet/WWW. These advances are already being integrated into what will soon become a increasingly available organizational computational environment, even for quite small organizations. Steps are being taken at the SEI to establish and maintain a support system that fosters the creation of networks of learning organizations engaged in software development and software acquisition. Clearly, stimulating the creation of learning organizations overlaps with activity in software process improvement, which is already a substantial part of the SEI’s mission and strategy. However, explicitly calling out the connections between technology transition, organizational learning and collaborative information technology underscores another dimension of the SEI’s responsibility to
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improve the state of the practice of software engineering: to address new challenges with respect to process creation and improvement. The SEI’s interests are only met if its constituency benefits. Because organizations typically do not have the time or resources to focus on new approaches and evolving technologies, and because cultural and structural changes are necessary to create learning organizations, there is a need to establish support systems—or learning consortia—to investigate, evaluate, pilot, and prepare the transition of approaches and technologies of benefit to the greater community. The relationship between the SEI and organizations engaged in the development and acquisition of software or software-intensive systems needs to be one of mutual collaboration. Establishing the learning network involves two way transfer of expertise and experience. The SEI can only provide useful information and effective support for learning organizations it has access to the success and failure of software engineering processes and technologies across many organizations. Unless organizations educate the SEI about the particularities of their specific contexts, the Institute will be unable to provide the tailoring information and guidelines that are critical for “translation”: to embed practice in the local organizational culture. The initial approach, suggested here, centers on building longer-term collaborations between the SEI and its partners or client organizations. Such collaborations must be relatively inexpensive for any one partner, but capable of amassing enough resources and funds for maintaining an effective support system by spreading costs over many partners. SEI will take on the responsibility of integrating and summarizing what is learned from each of its partners in terms of generalizations, processes, technologies and
services that can be disseminated to the community of learning organizations. Distance affiliation as an approach to community building
The SEI has an established history of partnerships in its resident affiliate (RA) program. This program provides the opportunity for experienced technical personnel from government, industry and academic organizations to participate in SEI projects for a period ranging from 6 to 24 months. To date, 124 affiliates have participated. Resident affiliates contribute both as software engineers and application-domain experts during their stay at the SEI, and they make up about 10% of the technical staff. The immediate payoff for the sponsoring organization is: participation in technical activities that might not be possible in their own organizations; access to SEI people, projects, and other resident affiliates; and access to early technical results. The affiliate benefits from working in a different technical context, from participating in the many workshops, and other activities at the SEI and in the larger Carnegie Mellon community, and from interacting with colleagues from different professional, technical, and organizational backgrounds. The SEI also benefits because it obtains experience, expertise, and additional insight into the software engineering community. Resident affiliates have been conceived of as change agents, both during their tenure at the SEI, and especially upon their return to their home organizations. While this program has been highly successful, the goal—with respect to operationalizing the change agency role—has fallen short. On reentry to the home organization, the affiliate may not be given sufficient opportunity to exercise his or her technology transition experience: to introduce new methods, processes or tools—new software
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practices—into the home organization. Thus, the hope, and the intent, that RAs will transfer the knowledge and skills they have acquired at the SEI to their organization may not be realized. Informal data shows this to be the case.
be better understood, and clearly identified in individual agreements, is the relationship between consultancy and affiliation, if it is deemed appropriate that some proportion of the SEI’s role includes consulting activity.6
We believe that it is time to reexamine and extend our present approach to partnering and affiliation. Many organizations who have participated in the RA program are interested in further interaction; many others who have not participated have expressed interest in exchanges of a different nature. In some cases, an important barrier to participation in the RA program is the requirement that the home organization pay the full salary of the RA. The concept of the distance affiliate (DA) addresses this problem directly and has promise for satisfying the change agency role. Distance affiliation is similar to the RA relationship except that the client organization member continues to work at the home organization for the most part. This requires that greater care be taken to negotiate tasks that are mutually beneficial to the SEI and the partner organization. Moreover, it requires a distributed collaborative environment where such tasks can be performed and viable outputs and outcomes can be produced.
Establishing several distance affiliate pilot sites will provide the opportunity to evaluate collaborative information technology in practice. One or more DA projects, for example, might use this technology in conjunction with activity in technology adoption and implementation, software process assessment and improvement, acquisition management, or the investigation and handling of security breaches.
Distance affiliation will have a number of benefits as long as technologies currently becoming available will adequately support distributed collaborative work. Distance affiliation can increase the number of affiliates to the SEI and relationships can be sustained for longer periods of time, at a lower cost to affiliate organizations and, potentially, greater return to the SEI. DAs can more easily become effective change agents in their home organizations and beyond. For example, distance affiliation supports continuously gathering feedback concerning software engineering processes, thus providing the data needed to validate best practices. One issue to
In order for multiple distance affiliations to be realized and a long-term community supporting the creation and evolution of learning organizations to be maintained, a number of issues related to infrastructure and policy have to be addressed. Viable collaborative tools have to be identified, evaluated, and piloted as part of establishing an affiliation with any given partner. This will always be necessary; however, it will be a larger burden for initial partners until standard technologies and procedures of use are instituted. Organizational firewalls are another problem for establishing collaborative environments that enable DAs to share information and their work. Investigation and careful testing of interorganizational firewalls will be needed. DA candidates will need to carefully negotiate, and then arrange to fulfill both SEI-related responsibilities and responsibilities to their home organization.. Most importantly, a process description and definition for distance affiliation itself, 6
A reservation expressed by a current resident affiliate, and shared by others, concerns the extent to which it is appropriate for the SEI to use distance affiliation as an opening to consulting activities
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including supporting templates need to be specified for negotiating tasks, activities, outputs, and outcomes that are mutually beneficial to particular partners and to the construction and maintenance of a communitywide support system. We believe that the concept of a learning organization and the aim to create networks for learning are essential elements for productive collaboration between the SEI and its partners. Defining work processes has made inroads into practice over the last 10 years and now extends to include process modeling, simulation and automation, as understood in the context of the organization’s larger business processes. In parallel, a second trend in response to the challenge of the coming of the knowledge society (Drucker, 1993), has seen the creation of knowledge-based organizations as being greatly enhanced by integration of quickly evolving information technology, We have tried to show that local adjustments in both of these movements are necessary. Within the process arena, it is time to counter-balance process formalization with process creation by leveraging individual knowledge through information exchange and reconciling diverse perspectives. An organization that supports information sharing and knowledge creation is likely to establish effective and efficient processes as well as to improve organizational life. Within the knowledge creation arena, we must grapple with a need to filter and channel information for knowledge-based decisionmaking. Information technology has, in some cases made matters worse, by exacerbating information overload. Approaches for enacting knowledge-based and learning organizations lag far behind the rapid evolution of the technology described here.
These adjustments within the process-based and knowledge-based movements pave the way for a more dramatic synthesis—organizational learning is dependent upon the integration of processes and knowledge creation in both theory and practice. The operational means for the application of this learning rests on identifying the information intensities in processes and then addressing these potential fault lines with improved processes using collaboration technology—with the guideposts coming from the discipline of organizational learning itself. Realizing organizational learning in practice through collaborative technology and integration with new and evolving technical and business processes will not happen by itself. Investigation and exploration are necessary. New communities of practice and consortia must be nurtured, which include people and organizations experienced and knowledgeable in collaboration technology, organizational learning, and process initiation and improvement. Most importantly, those familiar with the workings of processes in their local situations must be involved.. The rise of the network society invites us to rethink and revise how we draw organizational boundaries—giving rise to new forms of virtual organization and milieu for innovation (Castells, 1996). The organization attempting to understand its milieu in a network society transgresses traditional boundaries of inside and outside—radically altering what it means to learn and to innovate. The innovation challenge now extends beyond products to the processes that surround product development and work. Building learning communities or consortia based on the notion of distance affiliation is one way of venturing into this new terrain. However, the very notion of “distance” (Latour, 1997) is already questionable as we enter this future.
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Adler, P. A. (1996). Two types of bureaucracy: Enabling and coercive. Administrative Science Quarterly 41, 6189. Argyris, C. (1976). Single and double loop models in research on decision making. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(3), 363-375. Argyris, C. & Schon, D. A. (1996). Organizational Learning II, Reading, MA.: Addison-Wesley Bannon, L. J. & Kuutti, K. (1996) Shifting perspectives on organizational memory: From storage to active remembering. In J. Nunmaker and R. Sprague (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, (pp. 156-167). Maui, Hawaii: IEEE. Brown, J. S. & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities of practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation. Organization Science 2(1), 58-82 Brown, J. S. & Gray, E. S. (1995). After reengineering: The people are the company. Fast Company, Premiere issue, 78-81. Brown, J. S. & Duguid. (1996). The social life of documents. First Monday: PeerReviewed Journal on the Internet. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue1/d ocuments/index.html. Callon, M., Law, J., & Rip, A. (Eds.). (1986). Mapping the dynamics of science and technology: London: Macmillan.
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and human resources lessons from JosseyBass. Human Resource Management, 30(1), 89-112. Monarch, I.. & Gluch, D. (1995). An experiment in software development risk information analysis. (SEI Technical Report SEI-95-TR-014). Pittsburgh, PA.: Software Engineering Institute. Monarch, I.., Konda, S., Levy, S., Reich, Y., Subrahmanian, E., & Ulrich, C. (1997). Mapping sociotechnical networks in the making. In J. Bower, L. Gasser, L. Star, & W.Turner (Eds.), Social science, technical systems, and interactive technology. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995). The knowledgecreating company. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Orwig, R., Chen, H., and Nunamaker, J. (1997). A graphical, self-organizing approach to classifying electronic meeting output. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(2):157-170. Roth, G. L. (1997). Learning histories: Using documentation to assess and facilitate organizational learning, Working paper, MIT Sloan School of Management. On the WWW at http://learning.mit.edu/res/wp/index.html Schein, E. (1996). Three cultures of management: The key to organizational learning, Sloan Management Review, Fall, 9-20. Schein, E. (1995). On dialogue, culture, and organizational learning. E.M.R. Spring, 23-29. (reprinted from Organizational Dynamics, Autumn/1993)
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Schein, E. (1997). Organizational learning: What is new? Working paper, MIT Sloan School of Management. On the WWW at http://learning.mit.edu/res/wp/index.html Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline. N.Y.: Doubleday. Seybold, P. B. (1992a) Office Computing Group. (1992a). Doug Englebart’s design for knowledge-based organizations, Part 1: Required technology: Open hyperdocument systems. Paradigm Shift: Guide to the Information Revolution 3(8) 1-9. Seybold, P. B. (1992b). Doug Englebart’s design for knowledge-based organizations, Part 2: Coevolution of organizations & technology. Paradigm Shift: Guide to the Information Revolution 3(9), 1-15.l Simon, H. (1991). Bounded rationality and organizational learning. Organization Science 2(1), 125-134. Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and situated actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suchman, L. (1993). Do categories have politics? The language/action perspective reconsidered. In G. De Michelis, C. Simone and K. Schmidt (Eds.) Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 1-14). Milan, Italy: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Linda Levine is a member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to working on the diffusion and transfer of software technologies and change management, she conducts research in the areas of technology suppression, reasoning and argumentation, and design disciplines. Dr. Levine holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in Rhetoric and Communication. Recently, she has been working on the maturation and transition of risk management best practice, on exploring barriers to the adoption of process automation technology, and investigating legal issues in technology transfer and technology suppression. At the SEI, she is now working on organizational learning and collaboration technology, resistance, and frameworks for software process improvement and security improvement. Her publications have appeared in a wide range of journals, including American Programmer, Expert Systems With Applications, Journal of Legal Education, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Technical Communication Quarterly, and University of San Francisco Law Review. She was editor of Diffusion, Transfer, and Implementation of Information Technology, Proceedings of the IFIP TC8 Working Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, October 1993. In 1992, she was co-proposer, with Priscilla Fowler, to the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) for Working Group 8.6 on Transfer and Diffusion of Information Technology.
information technologies for use in improving software engineering processes and building organizational and community memories for the last five years. During this time, Mr. Monarch has developed and evaluated content analysis, information visualization, and information retrieval technologies to support the access, analysis, and use of software engineering textual data. As part of these activities, Mr. Monarch is working with various teams at the SEI to establish several software engineering information repositories for use in software risk and process improvement. Mr. Monarch has been working on natural language processing and concept based information systems at Carnegie Mellon University since 1981. He was one of the principal designers of ONTOS, a knowledge acquisition system used to build semantic representations for machine translation systems, and he has developed information systems based on selective natural language processing and the automatic construction of thesauri. He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley and a MA in Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh.
Ira Monarch is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Carnegie Mellon University. He has been investigating the potential of collaborative
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