Organizational Learning and Knowledge Technologies in a Dynamic Environment

280 Pages·1998·6.874 MB·English

by  Walter R. J. Baets (auth.)

ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING AND
KNOWLEDGE TECHNOLOGIES IN A
DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter Baets is Professor Information and Knowledge
Technologies at Nijemode University, The Netherlands Business
School. Previously he was Dean of Research at the Euro-Arab
Management School in Granada, Spain. He graduated in
Econometrics and Operations Research at the University of
Antwerp (Belgium) and did postgraduate studies in Business
Administration at Warwick Business School (UK). He was
awarded a PhD from the University of Warwick in Industrial and
Business Studies.
He pursued a career in strategic planning, decision support and
IS consultancy for more than ten years, before joining the
academic world, fIrst as managing director of the management
development centre at the Louvain Universities (Belgium) and
later as Associate Professor at Nijemode University, The
Netherlands Business School. He has been a visiting professor at
the University of Aix-Marseille (lAB), GRASCE (Complexity
Research Centre) Aix-en-Provence, ESC Rouen, Leuven, Gent,
Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tyumen and Purdue. Most of his
professional experience was acquired in the telecommunications
and banking sector.
ON THE COVER
The design on this cover was created by Ana Aparicio Brandau.
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING AND
KNOWLEDGE TECHNOLOGIES IN A
DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT
by
WALTER R. J. BAETS
Nijenrode University,
The Netherlands Business School
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-7923-8530-1 ISBN 978-1-4615-5773-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-5773-9
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers,New York in 1998
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
v
While time is the fourth dimension ...
you are my fifth.
For Ema, beyond time.
Chant XXIX Proverbios y cantares,
Campos de Castilla, 1917 Wanderer, your footprints are
Antonio Machado the path, and nothing more;
Wanderer, there is no path,
it is created as you walk.
Caminante, son tus hue lIas By walking,
el camino, y nada mas; you make the path before you,
caminante, no hay camino, and when you look behind
se hace camino al andar. you see the path which after you
Al andar se hace camino, will not be trod again.
y al volver la vista atras Wanderer, there is no path,
se ve la senda que nunca but the ripples on the waters.
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar. Translated by Walter Baets
vii
CONTENTS
FOREWORD xi
1. THE CHAOS WE CAN OBSERVE IN MANAGEMENT 1
1.1. Economic phenomena
1.2. Information society
1.3. Information Technology (IT) evolution: from individual to group IT
1.4. Gap between technology and application
1.5. Speed of change
2. WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM DYNAMIC BEHAVIOR OF 23
SYSTEMS
2.1. Dynamic non-linear systems behavior
2.2. Far from equilibrium behavior
2.3. Computer sciences and knowledge creation: experiments with artificial life
2.4. Self-organizing systems
2.5. Organizations as neural networks
2.6. Artificial Intelligence and genetic programming
2.7. Implicit learning
2.8. Organizational learning
2.9. Tacit knowledge
3. ABOUT KNOWLEDGE, PERCEPTIONS AND LEARNING: 49
MANAGING THE MENTAL MAP OF A COMPANY
3.1. What do we know of managerial processes?
3.2. Knowledge and experience
3.3. Learning and mental models
3.4. Measurement and mapping of mind sets: a connectionist approach
viii
3.5. Knowledge is not rule based, but parallel, or how connectionism is positioned
against rule based systems
3.6. The corporate mental map: what is important?
4. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR KNOWLEDGE 83
MANAGEMENT AND LEARNING
4.1. Artificial Neural Networks
4.2. Fuzzy logic
4.3. Intelligent systems
5. EXPERIMENTS WITH NEURAL NETWORKS 111
5.1. Market response models for fast moving consumer goods
5.2. Brand imaging
5.3. Introduction strategies in new foreign markets
6. EXPERIMENTS WITH COMPLEXITY AND DYNAMIC SYSTEMS 125
6.1. Perception mapping in banking
6.2. Client profiles for a more aggressive and better informed front-office
6.3. Risk management
6.4. Quality management
6.5. Dynamic thinking
7. IT SUPPORT FOR ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING: 177
THE ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS
7.1. The necessary and sufficient conditions for designing and using
knowledge networks
7.2. The necessary condition for knowledge networks: a learning culture
7.3. The sufficient condition for knowledge networks: the integration of
Information and Knowledge Technologies
ix
7.4. From organized Information Technology to a non-structured emergent
knowledge environment: the role of Intranet technologies
7.5. The corporate mission: sustainable development via knowledge
networks
8. A ROADMAP OF MANAGEMENT IN A DYNAMIC 215
ENVIRONMENT
EPILOGUE: SAILING BY(E) 225
ANNEX: AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL VOYAGE 237
THROUGH CONNECTIONISM AND POSITIVISM
(co-authored by Gert van der Linden)
A.t. Science and scientific action
A.2. The tradition ofIS research
A.3. The ontological and epistemological foundations of neural networks
A.4. Some comparative properties of artificial neural networks
FURTHER READINGS 257
SUBJECT INDEX 265
AUTHOR INDEX 271
xi
FOREWORD
I am not a born academic. I deliberately joined the ranks of academia at a fairly
late stage as a natural progression from my professional career as an executive in
what in those days was known as "decision support". My career had begun in the
telecom industry before the days of deregulation in what one would call strategic
planning and then I moved on to decision support in the field of banking,
developing trading room software and risk management systems. As I developed
decision support systems for real applications, the more I realized how very
dependent these systems are on decision design. I began to question a number of
basic business assumptions. I felt increasingly the need to review the way decision
support systems were conceived at the time since they not only limited what one
could do with computers, but also limited the decision-making capacity of
executives. I thus decided to take time out from my professional obligations in
order to be able to investigate the 'whys and wherefores' behind decision-making.
I experienced yet another disappointment at the beginning of my academic career
as I noted the academic research style prevailing in most Business Schools. The
academic community was adhering to a type of research methodology based on a
single view of the way humans think. There seemed to be a lack of critical
investigation into research methodology resulting in much research being mere 're
search' into prior research. I have therefore felt it necessary to annex a discussion
on research methodology explaining from a scientific point of view what I aim to
achieve and how I am to go about it.
But most of all, I was surprised. I was interested in exploring new ways of
thinking, ingenuously expecting surprises around each comer. I wanted to search,
rather than to re-search. The book invites you to share in my exploration. The
main question, which I hesitate to call a research hypothesis, centers on how
companies can best deal with a dynamic and transforming environment and how,
given such turbulence, managers can improve decision-making processes. With
this proposal in mind, one inevitably ends up investigating the properties of
knowledge and the functioning of the brain as well as considering information
technologies which can support new insights in these areas.
xii
At the end of the day, not unlike fellow managers and academics, I am a child of
my generation. And many of us educated in the 70s have had, and may still have,
a kind of a love-hate relationship with a book which, at least in my view, sums up
the 70s generation rather well: Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance by
Robert Pirsig (first published in 1974). If you were to ask me which management
book should be given as compulsory reading to students fmishing Business School,
or to executives following management education courses, I would opt for Pirsig's
book
The book you have in front of you is the result of a number of years touring
around as a part of an environment, to use Pirsig's terminology. Let me
paraphrase a few of his ideas:
Touring around on a motorbike, one observes the environment in a way that
is quite different from most other forms of twentieth century travel. Boxed
off in a car, you are removed from the landscape that runs by endlessly
pictured in aframe which resembles the TV screen. You passively observe
the environment passing by, distant, in aframe.
On the back of a motor bike, that frame is gone: you are in contact with
everything. You are no mere observer oft he landscape, but an integral part
ofi t. The feeling that you are present in it is tremendous.
One of the most important management skills which I would wish today's
managers to acquire, is this capacity to manage as part of the 'landscape'. The
reader will feel through the book how I have willingly been part of that
'landscape'. Rather than being a scientific observer in a laboratory, I have chosen
to be an explorer engaged in surveying the surrounding landscape.
I was astonished when a major bank asked me a few years ago to give a lecture,
during their annual Quality Aw ard ceremony, on 'Zen and the art of motor cycle
maintenance' as the ultimate quality handbook. With much joy and delight, I
prepared the session and the main message which I gave is the same as the one I