to bridge informational, conceptual and technological barriers. The organizational .... Users of the Garden can âwalk onâ these OM paths (a linked system of web ...
Supporting organizational learning processes through failure management Ralf Klamma, Matthias Jarke Lehrstuhl für Informatik V, RWTH Aachen, Ahornstr. 55, 52056 Aachen, Germany
Abstract Learning from failures made along the product life cycle is an effective way for enterprises to increase product and service quality and decrease costs at the same time. However, the product life cycle is distributed in time and space and therefore the implementation of organizational learning processes have to bridge informational, conceptual and technological barriers. The organizational memory used to bridge these barriers is threatened by reorganization, fluctuation of personnel, and change of technology, thus requiring a explicit representation of the organizational memory which is more resistant to changes. This paper presents a framework for organizational learning processes adapted from literature and the support failure management can provide.
1 Introduction It is a well-known fact that for individuals “learning from failures“ is a painful but successful process to create knowledge. The same is true for organizations. Only organizations which are able to learn from failures can avoid them, improve their performance, and adapt to changes introduced from outside or inside the organization. Failure Management (FM) is a strategy which recognizes the discrepancy between enterprise performance and customer expectations as a source for potential improvement. Industrial FM investigates the definition, enactment, and maintenance of both reactive and preventive processes for handling failures along the product life cycle [PFE97]. Nonaka's metaphor [NON94] of organizations as knowledge creating enterprises provides a useful framework for organizational learning processes which can be supported by FM.
2 Organizations as knowledge creating enterprises Argyris and Schön [ARG78] defined organizational learning as “the detection and correction of errors" while Huber [HUB91] stated out that learning occurs in an organization “if through its processing of information, the range of its potential behaviors is changed." Nonaka [NON94] presented a comprehensive model of how organizations dynamically create knowledge. Knowledge creation is reached by the interplay of tacit, i.e. personal knowledge that is hard to formalize or communicate to others, and explicit knowledge, formal knowledge that is easy to transmit between individuals and
groups, in the organization. Figure 1 shows the continuous spiral of organizational knowledge creation with the four modes of knowledge conversion: socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization.
Formal and informal representations (models, notes, web pages, etc.)
Externalization tacit
Principle of Escalation
explicit Model resolution,
Socialization
Combination Presentation networking (“Answer Garden”)
tacit
Error observation
explicit
Internalization
Model-based Workflow Support, Navigation Support (“AnswerGarden”)
Figure 1: Organizational knowledge creation and its support in FOQUS Socialization is a process of acquiring tacit knowledge as apprentices learn the craft of their masters through observation, imitation, and practice [CHO96]. Externalization is a process of converting tacit knowledge into explicit concepts through use of metaphors, analogies, or modeling techniques [MAS93]. A classical domain of computer sciences is the process of creating knowledge through formal information processing (reasoning, programming, data mining) which was called combination by Nonaka. Closing the circle, internalization is a process of bringing back explicit knowledge into daily work in the form of shared mental models or work practices. Knowledge creation in FM normally begins on an individual level where people observe errors. However, as long as the tacit or explicit knowledge cannot be shared with other people, the organization is unable to exploit it. By socializing individual knowledge, a tacit organizational memory (OM) will be created. Reorganization can destroy well-known structures, processes, and information in the OM. Dismissal, retirement, and fluctuation of well-trained personal can lead to gaps in the OM, and changing technologies may lead to system chaos and loss of routine. As a consequence, OM must be represented explicitly to deal with these threats. Explicit representation can be reached by combining existing information sources to a representation of the OM or by externalizing the tacit OM. One way to create the explicit OM is the usage of a cooperative modeling approach [JAR97] which leads to a central representation of the distributed knowledge in a repository. Evolution can be managed on the schema level as well as on the data level supported by repository technology.
The approach of
socializing individual knowledge to an OM, externalizing it to a formal representation, and internalizing it by a workflow management system and computer-based training has been followed in the project FOQUS (in German: failure management with object oriented technologies in quality oriented production) presented in the next section.
3 Technical support for organizational learning processes in FOQUS The goal of the project FOQUS [PFE97] was not the development of new FM methods but bridging the informational, conceptual, and technological barriers which hinders the dynamic creation, share and usage of knowledge in distributed FM processes. The process of organizational learning starts with the socialization of personal tacit knowledge. If a failure must be processed in different departments in order to analyze the problem and define a measure, two problems can be observed: either there is no allocation of responsibility causing delays in processing and reducing the effects of failure elimination or there are multiple defined responsibilities causing mutual obstructions in processing. Escalation describes a socialization mechanism enabling the processing of failures and share of knowledge between spheres of competence. The elements of the principle are shown in Figure 2. The three steps capture-analyze-correct are structurally equal for every sphere but different in implementation depending on the tasks and skills of every agent. (1) Capturing is the process of gathering and documenting available data in a comprehensive failure data model. (2) Analyzing is the process of interpreting available information. If no final solution is applicable or the agent presumes far reaching consequences, the failure can be escalated. (3) Correcting is the process of defining, performing and tracing measures for failure treatment. Success of measures is communicated to agents involved. The steps can be but do not have to be supported by computerized tools. With every escalation the failure is passed to one or more new spheres of competence. But this organizational structure is not externalized and therefore not suitable for capturing the change within the environment. A formal description language is needed to construct a model of the OM. The core of the formal language is: an input (object) is consumed and manipulated by a system and an output (object) is produced. The system itself is described by processes processed by agents using tools. As in the predecessor project, WibQus [PET94], this modeling process was supported by the repository management system ConceptBase [JAR95] that was used as conceptual modeling tool. The models created autonomously by the departments have been integrated into the central repository by means of socio-technical model integration techniques. This guarantees a consistent and uniform OM model for FM. Figure 3 is a screenshot from the ConceptBase system showing the language.
The formal OM model assures a company wide understanding on used FM concepts, which is needed for developing and coupling systems, defining coordination and communication interfaces between spheres, and identifying agents and exchangeable information. Reorganization of workflows and information flows can be planned on basis of the OM and changes are reflected in repository. Personnel fluctuation and technological change is softened by interweaving the concepts agent, process, and tool. Sphere of competence Correct Capture
Sphere of competence
Analyze Correct
Sphere of competence
Escalate failure
Capture Analyze
Correct
Escalate failure
Capture Analyze
Failure detection
Figure 2: Principle of escalation
Figure 3: Concepts for OM representation
Based on the intra- and interdepartmental workflow specification, information access has been supported by a workflow management system (WFMS) thus internalizing the work practice described in the representation of the OM in a rigid manner. Another way to internalize the socialized and externalized knowledge again, is computer-based training. We used the „AnswerGarden“ metaphor [ACK90] to facilitate the sharing of informal knowledge about failure cases along the product life cycle. Users of the Garden can „walk on“ these OM paths (a linked system of web pages) to failure cases which are helpful to fulfill a certain task like constructing a variant of an existing product. If paths are not promising to the user or if he/she has not found documented failures, he/she can send an electronic message to the responsible agent defined in the principle of escalation and externalized in the representation of the OM.
4 Summary This paper has investigated the metaphor of organizations as knowledge creating enterprises to provide a framework for organizational learning processes and how industrial FM can support these processes. The framework shows that the transformation of an OM constructed by socialization of personal tacit knowledge into a formal representation can be supported technically with formal and informal methods.
Again, the representation of the OM constructed can be exploited to internalize the knowledge formally by model-based Workflow support and informally by computer-based navigation support both realized in the project context. Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF) under grant 02 PV 710 25. The authors wish to thank their colleagues Manfred Jeusfeld, Peter Peters, and Peter Szczurko for their many fruitful comments and discussions. For the implementation of the FOQUS prototype we thank our students Marco Essmajor, Nico Hamacher, Gregor Lietz, and Axel Stolz.
References [ACK90] M. Ackerman, T. Malone, "Answer Garden: A Tool for Growing Organizational Memory", Proc. of ACM Conf. on Office Information Systems, 1990, pp. 31-39. [ARG78] C. Argyris, D. Schön, Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective, Addison-Wesley, 1978. [CHO96] C. Choo, "The Knowing Organization: How Organizations Use Information to Construct Meaning, Create Knowledge, and Make Decisions", International Journal of Information Management, 16(5), 1996, pp. 329-340. [HUB91] G. Huber, "Organizational learning: The contributing processes and the literatures", Organization Science, 2(1), 1991, pp. 88-115. [JAR95] M. Jarke, R. Gallersdörfer, M. A. Jeusfeld, M. Staudt, S. Eherer, "ConceptBase - a deductive object base for meta data management", J. of Intelligent Information Systems, 4(2), 1995, pp. 157-192. [JAR97] M. Jarke, M. A. Jeusfeld, P. Peters, K. Pohl, "Coordinating distributed organizational knowledge", Data & Knowledge Engineering, 23(3), Sep. 1997, pp. 247-268. [MAS93] R. Mason, "Strategic Information Systems: Use of Information Technology in a Learning Organization", Proc. 26th Hawaii Int’l Conf. System Sciences, 1993, pp. 840-849. [NON94] I. Nonaka, "A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation", Organization Science, No. 1, 1994, pp. 14-37. [PET94] P. Peters, S. Szczurko, "Integrating Models of Quality Management Methods by an ObjectOriented Repository", 2nd Biennal European Joint Conf. on Engineering Systems Design and Analysis, London, UK, 1994. [PFE97] T. Pfeifer (ed.), Fehlermanagement mit objektorientierten Technologien in der qualitätsorientierten Produktion (in German). Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, FZKA-PFT 183, 1997 (in German).
