An organizational memory is 'what the firm knows' and it has many components. Let's explore
a) Tacit knowledge (informal, unstructured and mostly unconscious expertise), contained in the heads of staff and outsiders who have a relationship with the organization. Some ways to get a handle on this is to do social network mapping or to have an interactive 'tacit register' on your intranet.
b) Expertise location tools. Either 'tacit miners' that scan and cross index electronic messages & documents connecting people and ideas, or open ended homepages with a quality search engine and templates (adds XML markup).
c) Document repository. Full text indexing, version control, security, paper trails and workflow. Access to formal documents, e.g. contracts, regulatory requirements, RFPs, engineering designs, customer reports, policy and memos.
d) Datawarehouse and datamart. Data repository for transaction and measurements (highly structured data). May have QBE (query by example), regular reports or an ad-hoc query interface, visual and statistical analysis facilities.
h) Groupware. Provides access to many to many persistent conversations and safe collaborative spaces.
i) Hard copy library. Traditional literature sources and catalogs that point to research reports, items in the firm's archives, books, conference proceedings and journal holdings.
j) Shared files. Multimedia items stored on servers and accessible via the LAN by multiple people and departments.
An important aspect of corporate memory is the relationships (organizational & personal) of its staff. Some of this information may be captured in specialized applications e.g. CRM and SCM.
The challenge is to provide secure access to these various sources, when needed, and only if authorized. So we see attempts to improve indexing & search using meta-language (XML), improved navigation via site maps and the hardest of all, getting quality contributions from staff that summarize their experience, give their perceptions / opinions and allow as much open access as possible. Large efforts are now being devoted to enterprise taxonomies and mappings to allow interaction with strategic partners and industry level exchanges (B2B).
The issues:
Poor level of engagement (lack of trust), low quality of contributions and lack of reflection (no shared vision and quality criteria), updating and keeping content (and the context!) fresh as external conditions change, (re)indexing and retrieval without a common shared ontology, in particular, having no 'forward' links from old content to new additions, capturing sufficient context to make sense to a wide audience, rating the value and use, both now and over time.
Some key problems are: finding a suitable representation to allow both flexible inference and introspection (for learning), crafting the social practices / policies, value set and discipline, to keep it 'alive, functional and useful'.
Corporate memories remain a pipe-dream mainly because of cultural and people issues. We struggle to bootstrap our own intelligence because we have not invented this practice yet.
This is a very exciting area with portals, personalization, collaborative filters, legacy system & ERP integration, personal blogs and RSS feeds taking much of the limelight. There sure is a delicate balance between finding people that know (+ having social capital) and providing instant access (wireless?) to the many information stores. In the end, I feel having informal communities that filter, massage, refresh and validate all the information, and a solid network of brokers to link across those communities, is the way to go.
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