Contemporary business process systems are built to automate routine procedures. Automation demands well-understood domains, repetitive processes, clear organisational roles, an established terminology, and predefined plans. Knowledge work is not like that. Plans for knowledge intensive processes are elaborated and reinterpreted as the work progresses. Interactive process models are created and updated by the project participants to reflect evolving plans. The execution of such models is controlled by users and only partially automated. An interactive process system should - Enable modelling by end users, - Integrate support for ad-hoc and routine work, - Dynamically customise functionality and interfaces, and - Integrate learning and knowledge management in everyday work.

Many organisations need to respond quickly to change and their workers need to regularly develop new knowledge and skills. The prevailing approach to meeting these demands is on-the-job training, but this is known to be highly ineffective, cause stress and devalue workplace autonomy. Conversely, organisational learning is a process through which workers learn gradually in the work context through experience, reflection on work practice and collaboration with colleagues. Our approach aims to support and enhance organisational learning around enriched work representations. Work representations are tools and documents used to support collaborative working and learning. These are enriched through associations with formal knowledge models and informal discourse. The work representations, informal discourse and associated knowledge models together form on organisational memory from which knowledge can be later retrieved. Our methodological approach to supporting organisational learning is drawn from three industrial case studies concerned with machine maintenance, team planning and hotline support. The methodology encompasses development and design activities, a description of the roles and duties required to sustain the long term use of the tools, and applicability criteria outlining the kind of organisations that can benefit from this approach.

This paper describes the application of the Activity Theory framework to the analysis of work practices in an organisation, to inform the design of a computer system for supporting collaborative learning in the workplace. A study involving the analysis of an organisation and using Engeström's expanded triangle model of human activity [5] is described. A methodology developed during the study for breaking down the extended triangle and applying it is given, together with practical examples. The paper concludes by highlighting strengths and weaknesses of the model, and suggests a number of refinements for its practical application.

The rapid growth of web-based instruction has raised many questions about the quality of online courses. It appears that many online courses are simply modeled after traditional forms of instruction instead of incorporating a design that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of web-based learning environments. The authors present a conceptual framework that can guide the development of online courses. Specific examples of instructional strategies that fit the framework are described in detail. Keywords: Online Instruction, Web-Based Instruction, Instructional Strategies Distance education is an instructional delivery system that allows students to participate in an educational opportunity without being physically present in the same location as the instructor. Although print-based correspondence study is the traditional method of distance education, more contemporary approaches rely heavily on various forms of instructional technology (Garrison, 1987). The reason for much of the growth in distance education programs in recent years is due to the development of the Internet and improvement of technologies that support online learning environments. For example, among higher education institutions offering distance education, use of two-way interactive video and one-way prerecorded video was essentially the same in 1997–98 as in 1995 while the use of asynchronous Internet-based technologies nearly tripled in that same time period (Lewis, Snow, Farris, Levin, & Greene, 1999). This change is not new to the distance education community, which has seen technology-based

Knowledge management is becoming a fashion in many organizations. This entails the danger that large investments in knowledge externalization are made with little short-term repayment. Moreover, there is a risk that knowledge management administrations operate in parallel and with little connection to the business processes. We argue that the main purpose of business knowledge is improved action, and therefore we must interrelate processes of knowledge creation and usage with the normal business processes both on a conceptual and a system level. The paper presents a model-based approach for solving this integration problem, and describes an implementation architecture which links knowledges processes to a workflow environment. Experiences in an organization where our system was successfully installed indicate that such a "light-weight" integrated solution offers a relatively easy and immediately useful entry point into organizational knowledge management.

this paper is structured as follows. The next two sections describe the design of the document enrichment architecture. Section two describes the identification and redesign of shared documents to capture informal knowledge. Section three describes the development of the underlying formal knowledge structure. Section four describes the evolution of the organisational memory. Section five discusses the applicability of the approach. 2. Characterizing shared documents

In order for organizations to keep up with the onslaught of challenges inherent in the knowledge era they must continuously learn. From a normative perspective, groupware technologies facilitate organizational learning by providing a means of disseminating and codifying organizational knowledge. However, in practice the potential learning benefits of groupware are rarely achieved. This paper aims to contribute to the fields of organizational learning, innovation and information systems by examining possible reasons for groupware failures, which lead to lost potential learning benefits and thus unsustainable advantage.

Abstract. Enterprise Systems potentially lead to significant efficiency gains but require a well-conducted configuration process. A promising idea to manage and simplify the configuration process is based on the premise of using reference models for this task. Our paper continues along this idea and delivers a two-fold contribution: first, we present a generic process for the task of model-driven Enterprise Systems configuration including the steps of (a) Specification of configurable reference models, (b) Configuration of configurable reference models, (c) Transformation of configured reference models to regular build time models, (d) Deployment of the generated build time models, (e) Controlling of implementation models to provide input to the configuration, and (f) Consolidation of implementation models to provide input to reference model specification. We discuss inputs and outputs as well as the involvement of different roles and validation mechanisms. Second, we present an instantiation case of this generic process for Enterprise Systems configuration based

Many communities exist that learn and share information either partly or wholly online. These (wholly or partially) on-line communities share messages, documents, and other artefacts that contain useful community knowledge. Members of the community learn through this sharing process, and the growing archive they create forms a valuable learning resource for existing and new members of the community. Two main kinds of approach exist to support community members in accessing resources. The first kind associates each communal artefact with a conceptual structure that represents its meaning. This approach requires high levels of maintenance, especially when the community resource grows at a fast rate. The second uses statistical and text analysis techniques to (semi) automatically derive semantics from the resource. There is increasing evidence that artefacts constructed and shared within a community follow genres revealed in the structure of the artefacts and the terminology used. These i...

Learning from experience, the cyclical interplay of thinking and doing, is increasingly important as organizations struggle to cope with rapidly changing environments and more complex and interdependent sets of knowledge. This paper confronts two central issues for organizational learning: (1) how is local learning (by individuals or small groups) integrated into collective learning by organizations? and (2) what are the differences between learning practices that focus on control, elimination of surprises, and single-loop incremental “fixing ” of problems with those that focus on deep or radical learning, double-loop challenging of assumptions, and discovery of new opportunities? We articulate these relationships through an analysis of learning practices in high-hazard organizations, specifically, problem investigation teams that examine the most serious and troubling events and trends in nuclear power plants and chemical plants. Our analysis suggests a four-stage model of organizational learning reflecting different approaches to control and learning. LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE IN HIGH-HAZARD ORGANIZATIONS 1