This paper seeks to provide insight that will provoke
action to transform the task of corporate technology training
into one of building a learning organization. Rather than debate
pedagogy or teaching and learning technology, it sets the business
context for learning requirements by a terse examination of the
business problems that can ultimately be solved through learning.
Part 1, 21st Century Business Imperatives
sets the stage and provides context for the challenges business
must face to compete for the future. These business imperatives,
in turn, establish The Technology Imperative, explained
in Part 2. Part 3, The Know-How Imperative
establishes the learning requirements (described in terms of a
corporate curriculum) of 21st Century companies, while Getting
There, suggests paths to reinvent corporate technology
training, and more importantly, calls for action, now.
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1. 21st Century Business Imperatives
2. The Technology Imperative
3. The Know-How Imperative
4. Getting there: Learning Architecture for Learning Organizations
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A long time ago, the radio and the movie picture
melded into a single technology: the television. All the rules
changed, a new paradigm emerged, and society was forever changed.
Recently the personal computer and the network converged, and
the world of business is being forever changed. With the advent
of ubiquitous communication technologies it became possible to
do conduct business in ways never before possible, to restructure
work, and to compete in ways no company has competed before.
21st Century imperatives will fundamentally change
business. These imperatives include reengineering core business
processes (BPR), industry engineering, strategic architecture,
enterprise integration, and extending the enterprise. The ultimate
purpose of business reinvention is fourfold: cheaper-better-faster-smarter
goods and services. Just as companies began getting the hang of
BPR, and even recognized that new processes must be continuously
improved, along came Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad with their prescriptions
in Competing for the Future. They recognized business process
reengineering as necessary, but far from being sufficient.
While some companies are busy reinventing internal business processes
others are busy reinventing whole industries. In this digital
age in which we live, industry boundaries are becoming a blur.
For example, Mircosoft didn't want to buy Intuit, makers of the
pervasive check book program, Quicken, to add another piece of
software to its arsenal. Indeed, it wanted to reengineer the banking
industry! If the Feds hadn't stepped in, we just might have been
paying Microsoft a nickel a check, forever. MSNBC is yet another
example of industry lines blurring. Strategic architecture has
replaced traditional long range planning. Companies are doing
some serious soul searching to find their core competencies, casting
off non-core competencies through outsourcing and relocating them
in the industry's value chain. In order to implement strategic
architecture, companies are in an intense pursuit to integrate
islands of information in functional departments. Enterprise integration
means not only internal integration, it also means extending systems
and procedures of the enterprise to suppliers, customers and sometimes
even competitors. In the era of the virtual corporation, often
it will be difficult to identify "the company."
Traditional business wisdom is that a company can compete in an
industry by being first to market (faster), by being the price
leader (cheaper), or the quality leader (better). Conventional
wisdom says that a company can't do all three. Not so. The Japanese
manufacturers taught us otherwise in the 1970s and 80s. Today
an industry leader must do all three, and, on top of that, make
their goods and services smarter: the smart car, the smart
home, and self-diagnosing computers. This means no more blinking
"12:00" on microwave ovens and VCRs. Consumers of the
future will not tolerate anything less than a fully intuitive,
friendly faceno instructions needed.
As foretold in the ancient Chinese proverb/curse, we do "live
in interesting times." Radical change, complexity, confusion
and chaos prevail as leaders position traditional businesses for
the digital economy, in not-yet-fully-defined industries. What
do these interesting business times mean for corporate Information
Systems (IS) and the technology know-how that underlies the business?
Getting straight to the point: a radical shift in skill sets is
needed to conceive, design, implement and support the high tech
operational world demanded by business engineering. In recent
years, the business demands placed on information systems can
be characterized as "continuous, discontinuous change"
from the PC revolution to the workflow revolution, the flattened
organization revolution, the I-net revolution, and on and on.
In short, today business and IS teams are being asked to do many,
very complex things they have never done before.
A brief examination of the forces under all these seemingly non-related
revolutions in business reveals a number if IS imperatives: today's
systems must be 1) open, 2) model-based solutions designed to
manage complexity, 3) designed for change, 4) engineered for rapid
manufacture, 5) pervasive, 6) intuitive and 7) intelligent, with
an enterprise reach that supports the extended and virtual corporation.
Today's corporate IS shops do not have the kinds of competencies
required to build these kinds of systems. Further, the expanded
competencies are not isolated to ISthe challenge isn't just about
technology, and it's not just about business. It's inseparably
about both. A new enterprise know-how, a business and technology
paradigm shift, is needed as we enter the 5th wave
of business technology shown in Figure 1.
Unfortunately, the increased sophistication of tomorrow's business
processes and information systems involves complexity that overwhelms
the current approaches to business engineering and systems development.
Complexity is the byword of today's business and technology
worlds. Business organizations, information technologies, and
business processes have become extremely complex systems and require
new ways of thinking. Both business and IS professionals of the
future will require a rigorous education in "systems thinking."
Systems thinking is the practical application of the first principles
of general systems theory. In both business and software engineering,
the ability to manage complexity depends on the mastery of systems
thinking.
Companies that have studied the problem of complexity for some
time are incorporating a multidisciplinary approach to business
and information systems engineering. Although a discussion of
these disciplines is beyond the scope of this article, Figure
2 maps these disciplines into a corporate curriculum or knowledge
base for the future. As shown in the figure, future competencies
focus on systems thinking as the foundation and include
business engineering, the science of culture, cognitive science,
learning disciplines, agent and object-oriented software engineering,
and the disciplines of teams.
While systems thinking is the heart of these core disciplines,
each of these disciplines take a holistic systems perspective.
Mastering these disciplines is to overcome the major obstacles
to building the 21st century enterprise. The central premise of
systems thinking is that the behavior of the whole system is greater
than the sum of the parts. The components are interconnected and
influence the other components, but to understand the system,
the whole system must be observed. It is the whole the business
that customers see.
The tools and methods of systems thinking include modeling and
simulation. These are not the tools and methods of most business
units and corporate IS shops. These are not learning objectives
of traditional training syllabi. Corporate training as usual will
not produce the needed competencies. The data processing skill
set is inadequate and additional roles must be staffed in order
to acquire the needed applied, behavioral, and cognitive skills.
Naively, early IS pioneers sent their programmers off to "two-weeks
of C++ training" to gain the skills for the new breed of
business technology. Results, of course, were nil. Corporate transformations
are corporate transformations, not new programming languages.
Current staff will be transitioned to new roles, but additional
roles and competencies are needed. Staffing, not training, is
the appropriate solution for obtaining much of the additional
interdisciplinary competency that is required. If a company needs
a violinist on its systems development team, it shouldn't send
a programmer off to a two week violin (V++) course. Hire a master
violinist! As one object technology pioneer stated it, "Want
systems people who can build event-driven, real-time simulations
of the business? Hire as many seasoned real-time programmers as
you can find!"
Today business leaders know they must transform their companies
or watch them die, but what about their training departments?
Must they transform or die? What is the role of training in the
21st century company? What are the learning requirements
of the new generation of organizations? Who will be responsible
for learning?
A common mistake made by corporations is perceiving learning is
a binary proposition: an employee is trained or not. Perhaps this
is true of incremental learning where new techniques are added
to our repertoire of current knowledge and skills. But, ask an
accountant or computer programmer to go to two weeks of training
and return a master of the violin! Your are asking him/her to
shift paradigms and progress from novice to apprentice to journeyman
to master in the new paradigm not unlike the two week paradigm
shift we expect of our technology staff when we use scarce learning
dollars to send them off to training.
The new corporate curriculum involves far too many people, disciplines, and skills for anything less than systemic learning throughout the enterprisethe building of a learning organization. There is too much to learn by too many people over too long of a time to consider corporate training as usual. Companies can't train people into a new paradigm, they must "grow" their people and organizations.
Who's Leading the Way?
Who is building learning organizations? A quick review of the 1996 MIT Organizational Learning Center sponsorship reveals a number of large corporations that have committed to building learning organizations: Amoco Production Co., AT&T, Chrysler, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), Federal Express Corp., Ford Motor Co., Harley Davidson, Herman Miller, Hewlett Packard, Intel Corp., Merck & Co., National Semiconductor, Pacific Bell, Philips Display, Shell Oil Co., Texas Instruments, and US West.
Federal Express provides a successful model for university collaboration. FedEx partnered with Christian Brothers University to develop a graduate program that combines the MBA core curriculum with study of object-oriented and distributed technologies. FedEx assisted the university in procuring the required technology, and participants are given company time to attend classes and to learn. The venture is in addition to FedEx's continuing college reimbursement program. FedEx is otherwise building a learning organization through its Center for Excellence in Information Technology. The center is directed by James C. Wetherbe, who also wrote The World on Time: The 11 Management Principles that Made FedEx an Overnight Sensation.
Other exemplars include the national insurance company,USAA, where techniques such as accelerated learning are applied to technology training. Approximately 40 college classrooms, representing a variety of universities, are located inUSAA's San Antonio headquarters, to bring learning directly to workers. Meanwhile, a billion-dollar retail chain provided personal book budgets and a weekly quiet day, Wednesdays, for their new object-technology team to read and reflect. Reflective time is essential to making paradigm shifts.
Just as the medical professions use internships and the trades
use apprenticeships, business and technology professionals must
grow through many forms of learning, especially learning by
doing. Through apprenticeships, mentoring, and other means,
continuous learning must occur throughout the enterprise. Knowledge
workers must be surrounded with the things that make them smart
as they work. The successful enterprise of the future will be
a learning organization. Arie DeGeus of Royal Dutch/Shell explains,
"We understand that the only competitive advantage the company
of the future will have is its ability to learn faster than its
competitors."
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Peter Fingar is a Learning Architect assisting corporations with business engineering and object technology transitions. He is author of The Blueprint for Business Objects and an editor and author of Next Generation Computing: Distributed Objects for Business, both published by Prentice Hall. He is currently completing another book, Intelligent Agent Technology: A Strategic Business Weapon. Peter speaks on object orientation, business engineering and technology transfer at professional conferences worldwide and maintains The Essential Object-Oriented Library for Business Engineering at http://home1.gte.net/pfingar
He can be reached at pfingar@acm.org.