Faculty of Science and Engineering Department of Computing COMP3780: Technology Management Assignment 1 The Learning Organisation Semester 1, 2021 Lecturer: Dr. Peter Busch Email:
[email protected] COMP3780 Assignment One Semester 1, 2021 Page 2 DATE DUE: 11.55pm on Tuesday, 23rd March 2021 Submit through iLearn as a single PDF document (https://ilearn.mq.edu.au) MARKS: 20% - 20 marks REPORT: Approximately 1,500 words The Task For this assignment you are to research available material on ‘learning organisations’ to provide comprehensive answers to the following questions.1 It is expected each question be roughly 300 to 400 words. You may add diagrams or tables. Ensure that you use in-text referencing. Remember, this is a Turnitin assignment. Do not just copy and paste. If you are quoting a reference, ensure you use quotation marks (“…..”) and acknowledge the source (see appendix 2). Where possible simply cite material – use quotes sparingly (see appendix 2). Ensure you provide your list of references/bibliography at the end of the 4 questions. 2 For web based references, provide the full URL and date accessed (see appendix 2 to get an idea). The Topic Consider the principles discussed in our textbook: Robbins et al., (2017). Reflect on contemporary management trends particularly with regard to learning organisations. 1. Consider the learning organisation of today (appendix 1 and other literature you find). When and how did this term first appear? 2. How do you think being a learning organisation influences management practices or vice versa? 3. Are there disadvantages to being a learning organisation? 4. As a manager, comment on the likelihood or not of information flows with regard to work productivity in a learning organisation. How would you measure these information flows? Big hint – your will do better in this assignment if you find a learning organization and use this company as an example in your assignment, framing the above four questions around that one company. Of course you would need to state why you believe your chosen firm (public or private) is a learning organization. Furthermore, higher grades (H/D) will typically make use of ‘scholarly’ literature to support their arguments. 1 If you are not familiar with finding papers to help with your research, why not talk to a librarian? 2 A list of references includes just those specific references you cited and/or quoted from, whereas a bibliography includes the references as well as any other texts (electronic or paper) you may have used in producing the assignment (e.g. you may have looked up a word in a dictionary). COMP3780 Assignment One Semester 1, 2021 Page 3 Submission – Soft copy only - Submit one pdf file only. Your submission time will be time-stamped by iLearn. Late submission of individual work will incur a 10% penalty for every 24 hours, or part thereof, it is late. So within 24 hours, the maximum mark that can be obtained is 90% of the full grade for that assessment task; between 24 and 48 hours, the maximum mark that can be obtained is 80% of the full grade; and so on. If you require an extension, please do so via ask.mq. This assignment will contribute a maximum of 20% to the final assessment grade. Remember it is worthwhile to have a go at each assignment as you stand the chance of gaining some marks, rather than none at all for not doing anything – every mark ultimately counts! Note this is a Turnitin assignment, meaning the software will detect if you have copied and pasted inappropriately (i.e. not used “…” quote marks where you have simply copied and pasted). Marking Criteria You will be marked according to the following criteria, these criteria will be applied to each of the four sections: COMP3780 Assignment One Semester 1, 2021 Page 4 Appendix 1 Duncan, S., (2019) “The key to keeping employees happy” The Australian Jan. 27th URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-key-factor-that-keeps-employees-happy/news- story/28818a790d0d6c7de12147fa90c4ac75 (accessed 15/2/21). The key to keeping employees happy The way an employee feels about their organisation’s learning and development opportunities is the biggest predictor of retention, according to employee feedback data captured across a wide range of industries. It just pips leadership as the most important, but those two factors are definitely the key, says chief scientist of Culture Amp, Jason McPherson. With a diverse range of clients from McDonald’s to the Richmond AFL club, Culture Amp’s employee feedback capturing platform has gathered insights from more than 18,000 companies worldwide. It’s a little like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; there are a few basic things that come into play upfront, like workplace hygiene. But once you get past those things, says McPherson, learning and development is the most consistent driver for people feeling good about where they work. Pay and conditions used to be up there, particularly in the retail industry, he says, but that’s all changed. McPherson says one hypothesis for the change is that an increasing number of people are gaining university qualifications, and people need to differentiate themselves to be competitive. “Everyone’s got one of them”, he says of university degrees, so people are now focusing more on experience, on-the-ground training and building job-relevant skills. They want to update their capabilities on digital delivery and applications continuously, and they want employers to support that For Millennials, high quality, continuous training is particularly crucial, says chairman of the Australian Human Resources Institute, Peter Wilson. “They expect to learn on the job, and that’s a key ingredient as to whether they stay with the employer or leave,” he says. “They want to update their capabilities on digital delivery and applications continuously, and they want employers to support that.” It’s important for Gen X and Baby Boomers, too, he adds, because they realise the impact of digital transformation, and know they need to keep up. COMP3780 Assignment One Semester 1, 2021 Page 5 Jason McPherson Finance and IT are two industries doing it well, says Wilson. But we’re also seeing the service sector, which constitutes 70 per cent of employment in Australia, picking up, he says. “By its very nature, service is the skill in which you add to delivering something of value to a customer, so your intellectual development is an important part of that.” Peter Wilson Wilson says the three most important factors determining how long someone stays in a job are: how they’re treated, understanding how their role fits with the bigger picture, and the opportunities available to learn and develop. Pay, he says, usually ranks fourth or fifth in importance. “If you’re an employer that doesn’t pay COMP3780 Assignment One Semester 1, 2021 Page 6 people on the market for what they do, then you’ll lose them. But if you do (pay them appropriately), the factors to keep them there are very much around their inclusion and development as professionals, managers or workers.” Although training and development is top of the list for retaining employees, it does need to be highly relevant. People are now more cynical of being sent off for training that isn’t closely aligned with their role, McPherson says. It’s, in part, because people “don’t sit in companies for 25 years anymore”, he says. “We see more of a portfolio-based approach to resume building. People will say ‘I was at this company for a year, and here are all the things I learnt how to do there’.’’ Changing times, changed training needs Training delivery methods are changing, and now tend to be more self-directed and just-in-time, says McPherson. The trend can benefit employers, too; with a more dynamic job market, and people changing jobs more frequently than before, they can avoid investing in big chunks of training only to lose the employee immediately after. Wilson says we’ve increasingly seen, in the last year or two, training that is “short, bite- sized pieces, bespoke to the needs of the individual”. There’s a much greater share of training delivery going to downloads, podcasts, consume-as-needed products because that matches the attention span of younger workers; it’s something they can do in a break at work to fill a gap, or perhaps later at night when they can focus. It relates to workplace flexibility, and the maximum attention span of Millennials, which he says is usually about “the duration of a meal”. Younger workers, the next generation, they want to learn, and they regard that as part of the employer’s responsibility Employers need to recognise the distinction between independent and interdependent work, the latter requiring an employee to have some face-to-face interaction and therefore underpinning the amount of time necessary at the office, says Wilson. Many jobs are 50-50, meaning for 20 hours of the week people don’t need to be there. Training methods need to fit with that, and employers ignore that at their peril. Wilson says employers often underestimate the importance of “good, continuous training”. It’s something the Institute spends a lot of time advising organisations to deliver on. “Younger workers, the next generation, they want to learn, and they regard that as part of the employer’s responsibility. If the employer isn’t doing it, and if you’re in a competitive market for people, they’ll go.” COMP3780 Assignment One Semester 1, 2021 Page 7 Appendix 2 Writing at university level means academic writing. Academic writing is not like writing a novel. Informal writing styles are not encouraged. You are required to substantiate what you write/say in your academic and professional lives. It is only in rare instances where you will be permitted to write works of fiction at university, it is also for similar reasons that the first person singular (I feel, I think, I did, My feeling is …), is generally to be avoided in writing university assignments (there are some exceptions to this rule, for example law faculties often adopt the first-person-singular in their writing style). As insulting as this may seem, as a student you are not considered to be an expert at anything (that usually comes with the title Dr. and then later Professor). The point is you need to state the source of your information in assignments. Furthermore it is generally considered politically-correct to avoid gender- specific writing styles; in other words don’t refer to authors/people/whoever as he, unless they actually are male - examine the following link. 3 For the purposes of this assignment, we will use the Harvard referencing style, although if you are comfortable with footnoting, please do so. Citing vs. quoting 1. Where an idea is ‘adopted/adapted’ from an author but restated in your words one uses citing as a means of establishing where the information was derived from. For example …… Smith (1990) was inclined to believe that … blah blah blah, … (where blah blah blah are your words, but the author’s ideas). No page number needs to be included for citing authors (but you must include the author’s surname, and date of publication of the reference where you have derived the information from). No, you cannot cite your friends (or lecture/tutorial/practical material). 2. Where the words have simply been lifted/copied directly by you, is referred to as quoting someone. For example ….. it was felt that “of all the database schemas, the object relational approach is …..” (Zhang, 1990 p. 53). In this case quotation marks are used as well as a page number stating where the information directly came from. Where you have quote that is longer than say 20 words, you indent these as a separate paragraph from the main body of your text and you single space the block quote, like so When faced with a small problem domain, system development can be all about modeling of user functional requirements. However, when faced with a large problem domain, such as with an enterprise information system, system development must recognize the demands placed on it by the non-functional system qualities. The quality of interest in this paper is supportability (Maciaszek and Liong, 2003; Maciaszek et al., 2004). Supportability is really the combination of three qualities – understandability, maintainability and scalability. An unsupportable system is a legacy system (Maciaszek, 2005 p. 17). …. Note, no quote marks are necessary, but you still include author surname, year of publication and page number. You do not need to italicise block quotes (or normal quotes for that matter). Lecture notes/course notes DO NOT count as references. These are not to be referred to in written assignments/reports (this is considered amateur-ish). 3 https://documents.uow.edu.au/about/policy/uow140611.html https://staff.flinders.edu.au/employee-resources/working-at-flinders/equal-opportunity/discrimination-and-harassment#inclusive COMP3780 Assignment One Semester 1, 2021 Page 8 Report structure The word processed report will include - table of contents - sub-titles - list of references OR bibliography4 The assignment should be space and a half or double-spaced. The reference list or bibliography should be single-spaced. Your paragraphs may either be left-aligned or justified. Bibliography/Reference list The minimum level of detail for each book/journal reference used in either a list of references or bibliography is as follows. For a book: Busch, P., (2008) Tacit Knowledge in Organizational Learning IGI-Global Hershey Pennsylvania U.S.A. For a journal article/conference paper: Venkitachalam, K., Busch, P., (2012) "Tacit Knowledge: Review and Possible Research Directions" Journal of Knowledge Management 16(2) pp: 357-372. For electronic publications (e.g. ones you’ve pulled off the internet): Busch, P., (2006) "Organisation Design and Tacit Knowledge Transferal: An Examination of Three IT Firms" Journal of Knowledge Management Practice 7(2) URL: http://www.tlainc.com/ articl111.htm (accessed 16/2/21). At the end of your assignment, you simply place all types of references together in alphabetical order of author surname. You do not list them separately by book, conference paper and electronic publication. 4 Again a list of references includes just those specific references you cited and/or quoted from, whereas a bibliography includes the references as well as any other texts (electronic or paper) you may have used in producing the assignment (e.g. you may have looked up a word in a dictionary).
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