Perceptions Of Organizational Learning Culture In The Aerospace Industry

The aerospace industry operates in a dangerous and unforgiving environment. Building organizations that understand the environment and learn from successes and failures becomes critical to success. Creating a culture of organizational learning then becomes essential. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore perceptions about organizational learning culture held by professionals in the aerospace industry. Eleven individuals participated in structured, written interviews that provided the participants with an open forum for others to understand their experiences in organizational learning cultures in the aerospace industry. These interviews were evaluated and then manually coded into themes. The developed themes included the importance of communication in the organization, the importance of transparency in the organization, and the importance of establishing, building, and maintaining trust in the organization. The participants in this study described organizations where they had experienced poor communication, experienced conditions of distrust, and experienced a lack of transparency from within their organization. Recommendations for further action are for organizations to realize that these study results represent a narrow view of a large industry. Organizations looking to build a culture of organizational learning should begin by assessing the effectiveness of their organizational communication methods; establish mechanisms for precise and consistent communication of goals and objectives at the organizational, group, and individual levels; and benchmark organizational trust attributes against peer organizations

A Use-Case Model for a Knowledge Management System to Facilitate Disaster Relief Operations

There are numerous disaster relief agencies poised to respond to disasters; however, coordinating the activities of these diverse and dispersed entities and capitalizing on their knowledge assets can be a challenge. All of these agencies are dedicated to serving survivors of disasters, but they at times lack the coordination necessary to respond efficiently. The Virginia Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD) is an umbrella organization of existing agencies dedicated to working closely with other organizations to improve service and minimize duplication during disaster operations. To better cope with disasters, the Virginia VOAD needs to develop knowledge management strategies to coordinate its resources. The goal of this study was to design a use-case model of a web-based knowledge management system to support state and local level disaster recovery planning and operations in the aftermath of a disaster. The focus of this study was to support the disaster field office (DFO) operations. The use-case methodology outlined in the Rational Unified Process and supported by the Unified Modeling Language notation provided the means of systematically discovering and documenting system requirements. The resulting model provides a framework for a knowledge management system that has been adapted to the disaster recovery domain. Evaluation and validation of the model has shown this to be a viable concept. It is anticipated that this model could serve as the basis for developing a prototype knowledge management system that may also be adapted to similar state and local VOAD chapters around the country