Organizational learning online

In times of continuous changes, enforced through globalization and networking, organizations face the need both to react quickly to experienced or occurring changes, and to act pro-actively to foreseen developments. An effective way for organizations to act and react is to model the business at the process level and to re-construct or rearrange this representation according to the needs for dynamic adaptation. This way potentials to cope with required changes can be explored dynamically and possible solutions can be evaluated before implementation - organizational development can occur "on-line". Once business processes with the user interfaces visible for users can be executed, organizational changes and solutions become transparent to employees. We report on both a framework and a corresponding tool enabling organizational learning online. The tool is based on a model-based representation scheme comprising business processes, problem-domain data, user and interaction modalities. The framework for organizational learning emphasizes both individual and shared mental models. According to the framework, the interactive execution of business processes effects single- and double-loop organizational learning, as well as the structuring of business intelligence in an organizational memory.