Is organisational/corporate memory a valid concept?
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Lay Iwan Setiawan
Ackerman and Halverson (2000 cited in Nilakanta, Miller & Zhu, 2006, pp. 85-86) define organisational memory as “the collection of historical corporate knowledge that is employed for current use through appropriate methods of gathering, organizing, refining, and disseminating the stored information and knowledge.” It could be inferred from the definition that organisational memory is as old as the organisation itself, it has been built in a continuous manner, and it could be used to deal with current situation or problem.
Organisational memory is a valid concept because it satisfies three conditions. First, proper use of organisational memory would deliver benefits to organisations. Organisational memory allows organisations to reflect on previous experiences and most importantly to learn from past successes and failures. Through these learning processes and proper utilization of organisational memory, best practices could then be created and implemented to improve efficiency and effectiveness. A study by Zhang, Tian, and Qi (2006) showed that organisational memory improves organisational performance, which is a key criterion used for measuring the level of operation of an organisation.
Second, improper use or loss of organisational memory would bring negative impacts to organisations. Improper use or misinterpretation of organisational memory could result in problems raised due to mishandled situation. Such improper use of organisational memory could happen when the organisational knowledge is used in a different context (Nevo & Wand, 2005). Similar mishandled situation could also happen as a result of organisational memory loss. When there is no evidence of past experiences on which organisations could reflect, there would be chance for past failure to be repeated. Unfortunately, as Lahaie (2005) argue, since most of organisational knowledge is in the form of employees’ tacit knowledge, certain degree of organisational memory loss could not be avoided when a long-term employee leaves.
Finally, the concept of organisational memory is applicable in order for organisations to benefit from it. In the past, the process of gathering, organizing, refining, and disseminating organisational memory is done only through face-to-face mentoring (tacit) and physical artifacts (explicit), such as printed documents. Today, the presence of information technology greatly improves these processes. Database technology allows easy storing and retrieval of organisational explicit knowledge, while networking technology eliminates space boundary to allow electronic collaboration to share tacit knowledge. In their article, Nevo and Wand (2005) demonstrate how information technology can greatly facilitate organisational memory management.
In order to get optimal benefit from organisational memory, organisations should carefully justify the extent to which they should utilise their organisational memory. As Nevo and Wand (2005) argue, knowledge in organisational memory is very much context-sensitive. Therefore, that knowledge would only be useful under certain circumstances. Not understanding the original context of the knowledge would result in inappropriate solutions due to misinterpretation of the knowledge. Moreover, the ever-changing of business environment would make some part of the organisational memory/knowledge become irrelevant to current conditions. Thus, it is very important that organisational memory includes the sequences of actions, reasons why the actions are needed, under what circumstances the actions are needed, and the results of the actions (Nilakanta, Miller & Zhu, 2006). Having all of these aspects in their organisational memory, an organisation could justify more easily how they are going to use their organisational memory by assessing the similarities between today and past context, and projecting the expected outcomes based on past outcomes. When some parts of the organisational memory are no longer relevant, organisations should only utilise the other parts which are still relevant and then refine the organisational memory based on current context for future use.
References
Lahaie, D. (2005). The Impact of Corporate Memory Loss: What Happens When A Senior Executive Leaves? International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 18, Iss. 4/5, pp. R35-47.
Nevo, D., & Wand, Y. (2005). Organizational Memory Information Systems: A Transactive Memory Approach. Decision Support Systems, Vol. 39, Iss. 4, pp. 549-562.
Nilakanta, S., Miller, L. L., & Zhu, D. (2006). Organizational Memory Management: Technological and Research Issues. Journal of Database Management, Vol. 17, Iss. 1, pp. 85-94.
Zhang, L., Tian, Y., & Qi, Z. (2006). Impact of Organizational Memory on Organizational Performace: An Empirical Study. The Business Review, Vol. 5, Iss. 1, pp. 227-232.
Posted by noah 12:37 PM
Labels: knowledge management
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