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redesign their mechanical calculator. The intrinsic vision carried only memories of their
success in the mechanical market. Unfortunately, this vision blinded them to changes in
technologies, namely electronic calculators. The lack of intrinsic vision took the com-
pany to the brink of bankruptcy and a resulting takeover (Walsh & Ungson, 1991).
Learning organizations have successful leaders who often are “systems thinkers,”
who focus less on day-to-day events and more on underlying trends and forces of
change. They learn not to view an event in isolation but to find its interrelation with other
events and to take action at the highest point needed; thus when a leader understands
the interrelation of events and problem points in the larger design, implemented solutions
will be longer lasting (Senge, 1990).
Harnessing the collective intellect of the people in a company is another challenge
for learning organizations (Senge, 1990). In part, the challenge is addressed through a
practice called knowledge management (KM). KM is concerned with the way businesses
collect and utilize the knowledge that exists within their organizations. The practice of
managing knowledge involves allowing new ideas to emerge and the processes that are
involved in implementing those ideas (Brown & Duguid, 2000).
Organizations can establish legitimacy by grounding themselves in nature and
reason. A firm does this by controlling the memory of its employees, causing them to
forget experiences incompatible with its practices (Walsh & Ungson, 1991). In doing this,
prior inefficient practices used by employees are discouraged from being continued.
These conducts are recorded by the company as a lesson to learn from but are forgotten
by the employees. In this way, more effective processes and procedures are incorporated.
A strategy that achieves this level of control is the data-oriented approach.
The data-oriented approach focuses on the organization of data, rather than where
and how data are used. This idea encourages the independence of data from the system
that uses it, thus creating a more enduring organizational design, as the data needs of
a business do not change rapidly. The data-oriented approach decreases the risk of
generalization errors. These include the errors of commission and errors of omission. The
errors of commission involve the entering of irrelevant information into a system. The
errors of omission occurs when transferred information is selective, resulting in impor-
tant parts of what it pertains being omitted (Walsh & Ungson, 1991). Tools that facilitate
ERP help enforce a data-oriented approach and limit the type of input a user inserts into
the system.
Consolidate Knowledge Resources Using ERP
Many data-oriented organizations use ERP software as a means to disseminate data
to all areas of the company. ERP is used to integrate departments and functions across
a company onto a single computer system that can serve departments’ needs (Koch,
2002). Normally, a department utilized its own stand-alone computer system that was
optimized for the particular ways the department did its work. However, ERP combines
them into a single, integrated software program that is divided into modules that appear
roughly like the old systems. Each department still gets its own software, except now the
software is linked together so that someone in finance can look into the warehouse’s
software to see if an order has been shipped. This enables the various departments to
share information and communicate with each other more easily.