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Institutional memory is a collective set of facts, concepts, experiences and knowledge held by a group of people. [1]
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(April 2017) |
Institutional memory is a collective set of facts, concepts, experiences and knowledge held by a group of people. [1]
Institutional memory has been defined as "the stored knowledge within the organization." [2] Within any organization, tools and techniques will need to be adapted to meet that organization's needs. These adaptations are developed over time and taught to new members of the group, keeping them from encountering the same problems and having to develop a solution that already exists. In this way, organizations save time and resources that might otherwise be wasted.
For example, two automobile repair shops might have the same model of car lift. The lifts themselves and the written instructions for them are identical. However, if one shop has a lower ceiling than the other, its employees may determine that raising a car beyond a certain height can cause it to be damaged by the ceiling. The current employees inform new employees of this workaround. They, in turn, inform future new employees, even if the person who originally discovered the problem no longer works there. Such information is in the repair shop's institutional memory.
Institutional memory requires the ongoing transmission of memories between members of the group. As such, it relies on a continuity of group membership. If everyone at the aforementioned auto shop quit at once, the employees hired to replace them would not be able to benefit from the previous group's experience. In such a case, the organization would have lost its institutional memory and operate less efficiently until the workarounds that composed it could be developed again.
Elements of institutional memory may be found in corporations, professional groups, government bodies, religious groups, academic collaborations, and by extension in entire cultures. There are different ideas about how institutional memory is transferred, whether it is between people or through written sources. [3]
Institutional memory may be encouraged to preserve an ideology or way of work in such a group. Conversely, institutional memory may be ingrained to the point that it becomes hard to challenge, even the conditions that caused it to arise have changed. An example of this would be an organization continuing to submit a form, even after the law requiring that document has been repealed, for fear of legal consequences that no longer exist. Institutional memory may also have influence on organizational identity, choice of individuals, and actions of the individuals interacting with the institution.
Institutional knowledge is gained by organizations translating historical data into useful knowledge and wisdom. Memory depends upon the preservation of data and also the analytical skills necessary for its effective use within the organization.
Religion is one of the significant institutional forces acting on the collective memory attributed to humanity. Alternatively, the evolution of ideas in Marxist theory is that the mechanism whereby knowledge and wisdom are passed down through the generations is subject to economic determinism. In all instances, social systems, cultures, and organizations have an interest in controlling and using institutional memories.
Organizational structure determines the training requirements and expectations of behaviour associated with various roles. This is part of the implicit institutional knowledge. Progress to higher echelons requires assimilation of this, and when outsiders enter at a high level, effectiveness tends to deteriorate if this morale is unjustly ignored.
An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses the same technology based on the Internet protocol suite.
Empowerment is the degree of autonomy and self-determination in people and in communities. This enables them to represent their interests in a responsible and self-determined way, acting on their own authority. It is the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights. Empowerment as action refers both to the process of self-empowerment and to professional support of people, which enables them to overcome their sense of powerlessness and lack of influence, and to recognize and use their resources.
Organizational learning is the process of creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge within an organization. An organization improves over time as it gains experience. From this experience, it is able to create knowledge. This knowledge is broad, covering any topic that could better an organization. Examples may include ways to increase production efficiency or to develop beneficial investor relations. Knowledge is created at four different units: individual, group, organizational, and inter organizational.
Historically there have been differences among investigators regarding the definition of organizational culture. Edgar Schein, a leading researcher in this field, defined "organizational culture" as comprising a number of features, including a shared "pattern of basic assumptions" which group members have acquired over time as they learn to successfully cope with internal and external organizationally relevant problems. Elliott Jaques first introduced the concept of culture in the organizational context in his 1951 book The Changing Culture of a Factory. The book was a published report of "a case study of developments in the social life of one industrial community between April, 1948 and November 1950". The "case" involved a publicly-held British company engaged principally in the manufacture, sale, and servicing of metal bearings. The study concerned itself with the description, analysis, and development of corporate group behaviours.
In business management, a learning organization is a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself. The concept was coined through the work and research of Peter Senge and his colleagues.
Collective memory refers to the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity. The English phrase "collective memory" and the equivalent French phrase "la mémoire collective" appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. The philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs analyzed and advanced the concept of the collective memory in the book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925). Collective memory can be constructed, shared, and passed on by large and small social groups. Examples of these groups can include nations, generations, communities, among others. Collective memory has been a topic of interest and research across a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology.
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
A decentralised system in systems theory is a system in which lower level components operate on local information to accomplish global goals. The global pattern of behaviour is an emergent property of dynamical mechanisms that act upon local components, such as indirect communication, rather than the result of a central ordering influence of a centralised system.
An information silo, or a group of such silos, is an insular management system in which one information system or subsystem is incapable of reciprocal operation with others that are, or should be, related. Thus information is not adequately shared but rather remains sequestered within each system or subsystem, figuratively trapped within a container like grain is trapped within a silo: there may be much of it, and it may be stacked quite high and freely available within those limits, but it has no effect outside those limits. Such data silos are proving to be an obstacle for businesses wishing to use data mining to make productive use of their data.
Tribal knowledge is knowledge that is known within an in-group of people but unknown outside of it. A tribe, in this sense, is a group of people that share such a common knowledge. In the context of corporations, tribal knowledge or know-how has been described most broadly as the collective wisdom of the organization and the sum of all the knowledge and capabilities of all the people; however, in management science, it is usually viewed as a particular subset thereof: a type of institutional memory that lacks adequate documentation, such that its preservation in the organization over time relies solely on processes such as mentoring, apprenticeship, on-the-job training, and, at the heart of all of those, continuity of staffing, which is inherently vulnerable to employee turnover. It is knowledge that is necessary to an organization's function and yet is inadequately documented or otherwise captured.
In human resources, turnover is the act of replacing an employee with a new employee. Partings between organizations and employees may consist of termination, retirement, death, interagency transfers, and resignations. An organization’s turnover is measured as a percentage rate, which is referred to as its turnover rate. Turnover rate is the percentage of employees in a workforce that leave during a certain period of time. Organizations and industries as a whole measure their turnover rate during a fiscal or calendar year.
Lateral communication is "the exchange, imparting or sharing of information, ideas or feelings between people within a community, peer groups, departments or units of an organization who are at or about the same hierarchical level as each other for the purpose of coordinating activities, efforts or fulfilling a common purpose or goal
Corporate amnesia is a phrase used to describe a situation in which businesses, and other types of co-operative organization, lose their memory of how to do things. The condition is held, by some people, to be analogous to individual amnesia.
Organizational memory is the accumulated body of data, information, and knowledge created in the course of an organization's existence. The concept of organizational memory includes the ideas of components knowledge acquisition, knowledge processing or maintenance, and knowledge usage like search and retrieval. Falling under the wider disciplinary umbrella of knowledge management, it has two repositories: an organization's archives, including its electronic data bases; and individuals' memories.
Transactive memory is a psychological hypothesis first proposed by Daniel Wegner in 1985 as a response to earlier theories of "group mind" such as groupthink. A transactive memory system is a mechanism through which groups collectively encode, store, and retrieve knowledge. Transactive memory was initially studied in couples and families where individuals had close relationships but was later extended to teams, larger groups, and organizations to explain how they develop a "group mind", a memory system that is more complex and potentially more effective than that of any of its individual constituents. A transactive memory system includes memory stored in each individual, the interactions between memory within the individuals, as well as the processes that update this memory. Transactive memory, then, is the shared store of knowledge.
Competencymanagement systems are usually associated with, and may include, a learning management system (LMS). The LMS is typically a web-based tool that allows access to learning resources. Competency Management Systems tend to have a more multidimensional and comprehensive approach and include tools such as competency management, skills-gap analysis, succession planning, as well as competency analysis and profiling. The CompMS tends to focus more on creating an environment of sustainable competency in addition to entering and tracking learning resources in software. However, conceptually, there is no reason why a CompMS or LMS could not be manual and indeed learning management systems are as old as learning institutions.
Collective wisdom, also called group wisdom and co-intelligence, is shared knowledge arrived at by individuals and groups.
The social sciences are the sciences concerned with societies, human behaviour, and social relationships.
Information culture is closely linked with information technology, information systems, and the digital world. It is difficult to give one definition of information culture, and many approaches exist.
The First Nations principles of OCAP establish a standard for how First Nations' data and information should be collected, protected, used, and shared. OCAP is an acronym for the principles of ownership, control, access, and possession. The principles were established in 1998 by Canadian First Nations leadership and are a trademark of the Canadian non-profit the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC).