Promoting the organization-wide learning of application software

Abstract

This paper describes the characteristics of a system designed to promote one sort of organizational learning (Senge, 1990), in particular, to enhance the organization-wide learning of application software (note 1). The system presented here will (1) capture evolving expertise from a community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991), (2) support less-skilled members of the community in acquiring that expertise, and (3) serve as an organizational memory for the expertise it captures. One version of the system has been partially implemented for a software engineering environment (Linton, 1990).In many workplaces … mastery is in short supply and what is required is a kind of collaborative bootstrapping of expertise. (Eales & Welch, 1995, p. 100)The main goal of the design is to continuously improve the performance of application users by providing individualized coaching based on the automated comparison of user logs to expert models. The system discussed here would be suitable for situations in which the following assumptions are true:(1) People who hold similar jobs and perform similar tasks have similar software usage patterns, e.g., managers use spreadsheet financial functions when preparing budgets, researchers use multiple views of the text when preparing journal articles, and salespeople use standard request forms when making travel arrangements.(2) Some people systematically make better use of their applications than others.(3) Everyone benefits when employees become optimal users of their application software (note 2).The fundamental requirement of the envisioned system is the capability to log the software usage patterns of a large number of individuals. Networked PC computing has recently made this logging requirement practical.