Is Your Technology Good Enough To Support Organizational Learning?

Important metrics and measurements for evaluating technology effectiveness

The emerging technologies drawing on social-software systems through sharing knowledge around the organizations can positively contribute to create new knowledge within companies.
 

To facilitate this process, executives should build an atmosphere of trust and openness and use these emerging technologies to convert organizational knowledge into valuable resources for companies in order to close the performance gap and help organizations prosper. In doing this, executives should also take a technological perspective.

In this case, executives understand how organizational learning as facilitating organizational processes and activities uses information technology to organize existing information.

Information technology can, in fact, play a crucial role in creating, retrieving, storing and applying organizational knowledge.

Executives have found that organizational learning embraces intelligent searching, E-mail, texting, and files. Executives, therefore, focus on individuals as the major source of knowledge, and show how employees together can affect the sharing, storage, transfer, and application of knowledge within organizations. Executives, therefore, see these connections, and the related shared knowledge and memory, as central to the effectiveness of knowledge and learning within companies.

Furthermore, executives have their internet technology departments to create a combination which reshapes existing explicit knowledge to more systematic and complex forms by, for example, using internal databases. Most importantly, in internalization, explicit knowledge is internalized through “learning by doing” which is more engaging.

Learning effectiveness can be enhanced today with the use of information technology.  Information technology can, in fact, play a critical role in the success of knowledge management.

For instance, scholars highlight the importance of information technology in facilitating knowledge flow and communication. Thus, the effectiveness of organizational learning is positively associated with using information technology and setting up useful software and systems to enhance strategic decision-making. Executives can develop information technology through employing IT business analysts and allocating more budgetary resources to share and utilize knowledge within organizations.

Executives can use information technology as communication mechanism manifestation and deployment and decision-aid technology. Communication technology provides the ways to enhance interactions among members and departments within organizations. This technology eliminates the barriers of organizational communications while improving the extent of knowledge sharing and access for all employees at various levels of the organization. Executives can also use communication technology to enact regulations, procedures, and rules aimed at coordinating intellectual capital within organizations.
 
Communication technology disseminates protocols among members, and allows them to be knowledgeable of their progresses toward meeting determined milestones stated in the strategic plans. Therefore, executives should measure the following parameters to evaluate the effectiveness of communication technology:

 How technology supports for collaborative work regardless of time and place.
 How technology supports for communication among organization employees.
 
Decision-aid technology also develops cohesive infrastructures to store and retrieve knowledge to enable employees in creating more innovative solutions to problems and managing operational risks. Ergo, decision-aid technology supports knowledge by enabling interactions and providing more comprehensive and effective solutions to solve organizational problems. Therefore, executives should measure the following parameters to evaluate the effectiveness of decision-aid technology:

 How technology supports for searching for accessing necessary information.
 How technology supports for systematic storing of knowledge.
 
In conclusion, success in today’s global business environment can be achieved when executives can effectively measure the effectiveness of technology. This article can offer several implications for practice. First, this develops a new and dynamic concept of technology within organizations. Importantly, this article offers novel insights into how the effectiveness of technology can be measured by quantifiable metrics and measurements.

Author Bio

Mostafa Sayyadi Ghasabeh, CAHRI, AFAIM, CPMgr is a senior corporate trainer at NIGC. In recognition of his work with Australian Institute of Management and Australian Human Resources Institute, he has been awarded the titles, “Associate Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management” (AFAIM), “Certified Professional Manager” (CPMgr) and “Certified Professional in Human Resources” (CAHRI). Connect Mostafa Sayyadi Ghasabeh Follow @mo_sayyadi