This study investigates whether organizations with a learning culture differ from other organizations in their IT investment process and technology choices. Data were collected from a national sample of 200 firms. The findings show that a continuous-learning culture significantly impacts the extent to which change management and technical flexibility issues are considered in an organization’s d...

E-Learning tools facilitate asynchronous (e.g., wiki) and synchronous (e.g., video-conferencing) learning. They may provide a cost effective way to train large numbers of people in global settings to leverage complex technologies such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools. Few industrial experiences from the use of e-Learning tools to train complex technologies have been reported. It is uncl...

Organizations that work in strategic alliances, also known as Collaborative Networked Organizations (CNOs), learn with this experience. The whole learning process in which they are involved with is rich, creates value for the alliance and should be better explored in order to improve the CNO partners’ performance when facing new challenges. The core content of this work is related to the charac...

Areito is the name of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that is being set up and used by multiple educational organizations in the Dominican Republic. Through Areito, it is possible to simultaneously create, manage and deploy a large number of Virtual Learning Communities (VLCs) oriented towards diverse aspects of learning processes in education, science and technology. The nature and specif...

All organizations learn, whether they consciously choose to or not-it is a fundamental requirement for their sustained existence. Some firms deliberately advance organizational learning, developing capabilities that are consistent with their objectives; others make no focused effort and, therefore, acquire habits that are counterproductive. Nonetheless, all organizations learn. But what does it...

Today’s global competition demands an unprecedented learning capacity from organizations. With this aim, knowledge management has become essential in organizations. Information technologies are one of the major knowledge management initiatives fostered by organizations, but they are not sufficient as enablers of a learning capacity. Knowledge resides in human minds and, therefore, employee beha...

• Set against the baseline perspective that health care organizations are complex adaptive systems whose future states are unpredictable and unknowable, the purpose of this chapter is to introduce a perspective of health care organizations that borrows from quantum theory and chaos theory to describe innovation and change not as rational, controllable processes, but instead as complex, uncertai...

How do informal learning organizations work with schools as part of a broader educational ecology? We examined this question through a comparative case study of two collaborative efforts whereby informal arts education organizations, a children’s museum and a community-based organization, worked with an urban school district to redefine the provision of educational services for children and you...

To keep pace in the accelerating business, software organizations have to continuously improve their products and processes. Therefore, a culture has to be established that promotes continuous learning and fosters the exchange of experience. This requires an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together ideas and concepts from computer science and information systems, business and organization ...

The Portal for Online Objects in Learning (POOL) Project is a consortium of several educational, private and public sector organizations to develop an infrastructure for learning object repositories. In this paper we address the issues of building such architectures including the metadata, software and hardware considerations and bootstrapping the system with initial content. We also describe t...