LTEC 6250 Reflection 1

Here we are again in the final core courses of our cohort for the Learning Technologies doctoral program. I am excited about this course, LTEC 6250 because I am interested in understanding the differences in how education manages its educational systems theory, analysis, planning, and evaluation versus the business world. I have worked on numerous digital transformations for the last sixteen years. I have seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and let’s not name the last one. Many digital transformation initiatives occur across all disciplines or industries in the marketplace. Still, some companies fail in a successful transformation due to not understanding their problems or barriers and lack of vision and scope to align with corporate objectives. Most businesses need to recognize the need for due diligence during the discovery phase of the transformation process when describing the charter, scope, strategies, and essential performance indicators to measure the effectiveness of the workstreams they wish to adopt. It all goes back to how organizations are designed and aligned with strategies, structures, systems, and processes at the enterprise level.

Designing organizations can be complex without understanding the core principles of its vision and mission. The structure of an organization, its culture, and its procedures and processes can all substantially impact its effectiveness, adaptability, and capacity to fulfill its goals. After reading Galbraith (2014), I agree that organizational designs are more complex today, and companies want higher performance (p. 6). Other issues include the variety and diversity of units that must be coordinated across the organization to execute its mission and the interdependence between the teams and the change management (p. 7). Working with a variety and diversity of units, we called this working with cross-functional matrix organization. Another factor I agree with is that strategies will change if your company grows or pursues growth (p.14). The single-business strategy and functional organization seem to be represented in the marketplace today; even when you first start, you must evolve into an active organization. Most companies try to divide into different business units but find their way back to a functional organization (p. 57-62). Diverse single-business strategies result in various functional organizations (p. 66)

System thinking is to get us to think about systems. According to Boardman & Sauser

(2008), to think about systems is to engage in system thinking. We must employ our mental capacities and the tools we have gained for cognizing, analyzing, and synthesizing to dwell on the systems confronting us. After reading some of the perspectives of engineering and systems, the Google story is remarkable for systems thinking. I want to learn more about systems thinking and am excited for what will continue to unfold in this course in acquiring knowledge.

References

Galbraith, J. R. (2014). Designing organizations: Strategy, structure, and process at the business unit and enterprise levels. John Wiley & Sons.

John Boardman, & Sauser, B. (2008). Systems thinking: Coping with 21st century problems. CRC Press.