Keeping up with the technology “Joneses”.

Learning from other people, picking up bad habits as well as good ones seems to be a deliberate action according to our Lesson and Albert Bandura. As naturally social creatures we help each other and we also learn from each other, (PSU, WC, L.4, P2). Modeling, a certain type of social learning identified and coined by Albert Bandura is so practical, easily implementable and effective; organizations have put this into action for changing work environments (PSU, WC, L.4, P2).

Modeling in a social environment allows for creativity in addition to learning from others, (PSU, WC, L.4, P2). The person or group learning replicates certain actions but also exhibit modification based on their own experiences and desires, (PSU, WC, L.4, P2). These socially learned behaviors happen in a four step process proposed by Albert Bandura, which involve attention, retention, reproduction and motivation (PSU, WC, L.4, P3). In this case I would like focus on social learning from an organizational perspective, in which groups adapt to meet changes in the work environment. Keeping up with technology in an organization is very critical in the world we live in today.

In my own experience; I have worked for the government for most of my adult career in some way, shape or form. My current official title is a Financial Systems Analyst. My directorate concentrates on a debit card program that is owned by the United States Department of the Treasury and is fiscally managed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and proliferated and implemented by us for the different military branches of service.

I am responsible for the direct management of the program for the continental United States, my colleagues are responsible for Europe, the Southern and Western parts of Asia and the Gulf Cooperation Council, GCC area, which is a fancy way of saying the Middle East. The U.S. government as a whole tends to keep up with the latest in technology. As a directorate, as a small part of the military industrial complex, we have had to change our mind set as an organization to come up with better, more efficient ways to run programs through technology for the U.S. government. As a group it can sometimes be hard to agree on how this can be done.

Some argue that it is the individual who learns in a group and not the organization as whole but according to R. Moran, people tend to learn differently in a group, people appear to think in conjunction with others and with the help of culturally provided tools. Look up the word organism, you will find varied definitions but one definition I found at Dictionary.com had to say an organism is: any complex thing or system having properties and functions determined not only by the properties and relations of its individual parts, but by the character of the whole that they compose and by the relations of the parts to the whole. This is not a far cry of what a business organization is made up of or how it functions and the end state is to do it together because one person, one piece cannot.

Electronic commerce is an initiative that has been directed to us from as far up the chain as the President of the United States. Where we had free reign to change as much or as little of the program as we decided, collectively we are now obligated to come up with more cost efficient ways through technology to administer the governments programs across the board. The status quo is no longer accepted in these parts. There had to be a total change in mind set starting from the top tier of management to the lower echelons of personnel. Unfortunately, sometimes this change even meant getting rid of personnel that were no longer suited or had the capacity to lead us into the 21 century.

This is what it has come to in big business and sometimes it is not so nice. Technology is essential to every business, even if they are not considered a “technology company”. To compete in today’s business world, keeping up with the technology “Joneses” is important. It is now part of the social fabric of our lives. The issue is not necessarily the technology itself but how to systematically keep up with it in efficient ways.

References:

Pennsylvania State University, World Wide Campus (2017). OLEAD 410 Lesson 4: Global Communication. Retrieved on February 8, 2017. https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1826457/modules/items/21654116

Moran, Ph.D., R. T., Abramson, Ph.D., N. R., & Moran, MA, S. V. (2014). Managing Cultural Differences; Ninth Edition. Chapter 4: Global Leaders Learning from Others and Change. New York, NY, USA: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group.