Organizational learning

Organizational learning

Typically, in the IT domain, there are two sources of productivity improvements[1]. Both result from improving the capability of the organization.

First, the organization can improve productivity based on the experience gained from handling assignments over time. This learning-by-doing from IT service experience is also known as autonomous learning.

Improved capability leads to increased productivity.

Second, the organization can improve productivity by investing in improving its internal processes. Such investments include investments in automation of various testing platforms, software development platforms, software support applications, and in employee training. These conscious efforts by the organization to improve its processes result in what is known as induced learning. They should improve the company-level and employee-level capability, thus reducing its unit cost.

Autonomous and induced learning comprise the learning capacity of the organization,i.e. its capability to identify, assimilate, and apply external knowledge.

Acquiring information about the learning capacity of an organization is one of the challenges faced by the managers in evaluating and selecting teams for working on projects.

Question is how the managers can check if the expected learning takes place? How to measure learning in the first place? How can the managers check if the benefits of the new learning are shared fairly and reflected in the reduced unit cost? That the potential of the organization is fully utilized?

You can use KEDEHub to check the historical capability of the team and each of the individuals.

A learning organization

A learning organization is skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. Being a learning organization enables agility, adaptability, resiliency and the ability to meet the evolving needs of organization's stakeholders and the marketplace as a whole.

An organization which continuously increases its capability is a learning organization.

The increase in capability should be viewed in comparison with your organization's peers in the industry. Sometimes just to maintain the same capability an organization has to acquire and apply a lot of new knowledge. A learning organization can be in a situation like the Red Queen's country where "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!." Hence if the capability in the company declines on average then an organization that maintains it must be a learning organization.