Open organizational learning: Stakeholder knowledge for process development

Abstract

When developing organizations their stakeholders are increasingly involved in structuring and adapting work processes. Understanding process design as open learning facility allows promoting organizational structures and change proposals in an informed and bottom-up way. In this work the constitutive elements and processes of such a participatory infrastructure are studied from an open educational resource and open access perspective on the individual and collective level. Besides providing OER the focus is on generating work process-relevant knowledge from an individual perspective, disseminating it for collective reflection, and propagating it to organizational practice. Creating, sharing, and finally, processing this knowledge in open organizational learning environments targeting business process development requires federating social media, semantic content management, business process modelling and execution systems. Stakeholders contribute through (i) articulating proposals on how to organize work, (ii) annotating content in the course of exploiting, sharing and reflecting on these proposals, and (iii) executing process models to experience a certain structure of work. Applying this approach in a healthcare setting could reveal organizational benefits due to the contextualized and traceable sharing of (generated) content with other stakeholders. In particular, the interactive execution of work processes from each stakeholder’s perspective (enabled through subject orientation) ensures timely involvement in development fitting stakeholder capabilities and needs.