Supporting Organisational learning with Technologies for Electronic Documents

Supporting the opportunistic learning that often occurs in organizations requires other approaches than traditional document centric knowledge management techniques and intelligent learning environments. Such opportunistic learning takes place in situations where (1) the learner is engaged in tasks/activities where there are no known solutions a priori, (2) where it is not easy to evaluate learning outcomes and (3) where the learning environment is dynamic: new information, processes, people are continuously evolving. This paper discusses this type of learning and describes how technologies for electronic documents could be used to augment an existing corporate memory framework that captures lessons learnt (L2Corp [Alem 98]) with a project memory and a tool for finding people. We argue that an intelligent organisational learning system needs to capture and represent the lessons learnt, needs to capture in a project memory the documents created and the electronic discussions between people, and should provide a means for finding experts within the organization.