Organizational memory

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Organizational memory (OM), sometimes called institutional memory or corporate 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. [1] 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.

Contents

Organizational memory can only be applied if it can be accessed. To make use of it, organizations must have effective retrieval systems for their archives and members with good memory recall. Its importance to an organization depends upon how well individuals can apply it, a discipline known as experiential learning or evidence-based practice. In the case of individuals, organizational memory's accuracy is invariably compromised by the inherent limitations of human memory. Individuals' reluctance to admit to mistakes and difficulties compounds the problem. The actively encouraged flexible labor market has imposed an Alzheimer's-like corporate amnesia on organizations that creates an inability to benefit from hindsight. [2]

Nature

Organizational memory is composed of:

Of these, institution-created knowledge is the most important.

The three main facets of organizational memory are data, information, and knowledge. It is important to understand the differences between each of these.

Data is a fact depicted as a figure or a statistic, while data in context—such as in a historical time frame—is information.

By contrast, knowledge is interpretative and predictive. Its deductive character allows a person with knowledge to understand the implications of information, and act accordingly. The term has been defined variously by different experts: Alvin Goldman described it as justified true belief; [3] Bruce Aune saw it as information in context; [4] Verna Alee defined it as experience or information that can be communicated or shared; [5] and Karl Wiig said it was a body of understanding and insights for interpreting and managing the world around us. [6]

The word knowledge comes from the Saxon word cnaw-lec. The suffix lec has become, in modern English, -like. So, knowledge means "cnaw-like", with cnaw meaning "emerge". Its best interpretation, then, is that it is an emergent phenomenon, an extension of existing erudition.

Once knowledge is documented, it reverts to being information. New knowledge—what some academics[ who? ] call knowledge in action—is that which is either created incrementally, accidentally, or through innovation. Incremental knowledge is the product of prior experience that is already established and recognized—so-called "organic learning" that builds one experience on another (also known as existent or historical knowledge). It is the most common form of learning. By way of a simple illustration, existent knowledge is the established awareness that, because it is hot, it is necessary to avoid sunburn and dehydration. Existent knowledge becomes new knowledge when (for example) a European on a summer vacation in Mexico, being used to wearing a cap on sunny days at home, decides to wear a sombrero.

The second type of knowledge, accidental knowledge, happens unexpectedly—such as what happened in 1928 when a mold spore drifted onto a culture dish in the laboratory of Scottish research scientist Alexander Fleming while he was on a two-week holiday. It seeded a blue mold—penicillin—that killed off a harmful bacterium.

The third type of knowledge, innovative knowledge, is the labor of genius, such as the work of Leonardo da Vinci—who, in the late 15th century, conceptualized cutting-edge ideas like the aeroplane, the parachute, cranes, submarines, tanks, water pumps, canals, and drills. Innovative knowledge encompasses the type of learning that leapfrogs the other types, and—in da Vinci's case—was so advanced that it had to wait hundreds of years for incremental learning to catch up.

The difference between explicit and tacit knowledge

In its modern understanding, knowledge is made up of explicit knowledge , sometimes called skilled knowledge; and tacit or cognitive knowledge (sometimes known as "coping skills"), a category first identified by Michael Polanyi in 1958. [7]

Explicit knowledge is the "what" of know-how: knowledge such as the professional or vocational skills that are recorded in manuals, textbooks, and training courses. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is the non-technical "how" of getting things done—what Edward de Bono, the inventor of lateral thinking, calls operacy, or the skill of action, [8] and what Peter Drucker identifies in the use of the word techne , the Greek for "skill". [9] Much of it is implicit and ambiguous, acquired largely by functional, context-specific experience. Typically existing only in the minds of individuals, tacit knowledge is normally very difficult to capture, with most organizations depending almost entirely on the explicit knowledge. This makes experiential learning, productivity gains, and competitiveness slow and expensive to acquire. In business terms, tacit knowledge is a passive misnomer for active sharing of knowledge to make an organization more effective. Training programs, for instance, cannot be limited to a source-recipient model, and should leverage mutual exchanges across generations. [10]

The reality is that even though most organizational work processes are largely designed around documentation, much remains unrecorded, especially that to do with decision-making. The record often reflects the desire to gloss over disagreements and serious questions, or the desire to sell or excuse.

Given the high levels of corporate amnesia in commerce and industry, some organizations are turning to new techniques to preserving their organizational memory and, in particular, their tacit knowledge. The latest capture tools to get attention are the traditional corporate history, usually produced once or twice every 100 years as a public relations medium; and oral debriefing, an augmentation of the old-fashioned prescriptive and formulaic exit interview. Instead of hagiography, organizational memory is being produced as an induction and educational tool that transmits long-term information. Oral debriefing, which concentrates on short- and medium-term memory, targets exiting and key occupant employees, recurring corporate events, and important projects in detailed testimony of participants. Both are designed to extract tacit knowledge in an easily accessible format that also generates the "lessons of history". Its permanent character also means that it does not have to be continually reproduced, just updated, and that its necessary re-interpretation alongside changing circumstances is predicated on a more reliable evidential base.

How experiential learning works

When it comes to experiential learning, an awareness of both the explicit and tacit components of organizational memory on their own is not generally enough to create new knowledge efficiently. As a general rule, it needs to be accompanied by a focused learning phase.

Most models of experiential learning are cyclical and have three basic phases:

  1. Awareness of an experience or problem situation;
  2. A reflective phase within which the learner examines the OM around the experience and draws erudition from that reflection; and
  3. A testing phase within which the new insights or learnings, having been integrated with the learner's own conceptual framework, are applied to a new problem situation or experience.

The concept's starting point [11] is that individuals or organizations seldom learn from experience, unless the experience is assessed and then assigned its own meaning in terms of individual and/or the organization's own goals, aims, ambitions, and expectations. From these processes come insights and added meaning, which is then applied to new circumstances. The end product is better decision-making.

Types

Organizational memory can be subdivided into the following types:

Professional
Reference material, documentation, tools, methodologies
Company
Organizational structure, activities, products, participants
Individual
Status, competencies, know-how, activities
Project
Definition, activities, histories, results

Exploring

Key decisions organizations make when exploring organizational memory include:

Most commercial knowledge management efforts have included building some form of organizational memory to capture expertise, speed learning, help the organization remember, record decision rationale, document achievements, or learn from past failures.

See also

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knowledge management</span> Process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization

Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knowledge transfer</span> Sharing knowledge for problem solving

Knowledge transfer refers to transferring an awareness of facts or practical skills from one entity to another. The particular profile of transfer processes activated for a given situation depends on (a) the type of knowledge to be transferred and how it is represented and (b) the processing demands of the transfer task. From this perspective, knowledge transfer in humans encompasses an expertise from different disciplines: psychology, cognitive anthropology, anthropology of knowledge, communication studies and media ecology.

Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge—as opposed to formalized, codified or explicit knowledge—is knowledge that is difficult to express or extract; therefore it is more difficult to transfer to others by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. This can include motor skills, personal wisdom, experience, insight, and intuition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Experiential learning</span> Learn by reflect on active involvement

Experiential learning (ExL) is the process of learning through experience, and is more narrowly defined as "learning through reflection on doing". Hands-on learning can be a form of experiential learning, but does not necessarily involve students reflecting on their product. Experiential learning is distinct from rote or didactic learning, in which the learner plays a comparatively passive role. It is related to, but not synonymous with, other forms of active learning such as action learning, adventure learning, free-choice learning, cooperative learning, service-learning, and situated learning.

Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include ICT Professionals, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living".

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activities. It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning. It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM).

Organizational intelligence (OI) is the capability of an organization to comprehend and create knowledge relevant to its purpose; in other words, it is the intellectual capacity of the entire organization. With relevant organizational intelligence comes great potential value for companies and organizations to figure out where their strengths and weaknesses lie in responding to change and complexity.

Business simulation or corporate simulation is simulation used for business training, education or analysis. It can be scenario-based or numeric-based.

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.

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.

Oral debriefing is the interview process of obtaining detailed verbal testimony from individuals. Analogous to interviews that are undertaken in journalism and sociology, its outcome in a comprehensive form is also known as ‘oral history’. Its application is additionally evident in disciplines ranging from psychotherapy, witness interrogation in crime investigations and in industry and commerce, both in oral and visual formats.

A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DIKW pyramid</span> Data, information, knowledge, wisdom hierarchy

The DIKW pyramid, also known variously as the DIKW hierarchy, wisdom hierarchy, knowledge hierarchy, information hierarchy, information pyramid, and the data pyramid, refers loosely to a class of models for representing purported structural and/or functional relationships between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. "Typically information is defined in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge".The DIKW acronym has worked into the rotation from knowledge management. It demonstrates how the deep understanding of the subject emerges, passing through four qualitative stages: D – data, I – information, K – knowledge and W – wisdom

A network-centric organization is a network governance pattern which empowers knowledge workers to create and leverage information to increase competitive advantage through the collaboration of small and agile self-directed teams. It is emerging in many progressive 21st century enterprises. This implies new ways of working, with consequences for the enterprise’s infrastructure, processes, people and culture.

Knowledge sharing is an activity through which knowledge is exchanged among people, friends, peers, families, communities, or within or between organizations. It bridges the individual and organizational knowledge, improving the absorptive and innovation capacity and thus leading to sustained competitive advantage of companies as well as individuals. Knowledge sharing is part of the knowledge management process.

A knowledge organization is a management idea, describing an organization in which people use systems and processes to generate, transform, manage, use, and transfer knowledge-based products and services to achieve organizational goals.

Arnold Kransdorff is a British author, business historian and publisher who was the first to identify and directly address the phenomenon of corporate amnesia in the early 1980s, soon after the flexible labour market started to make a significant impact on job tenure and related productivity growth. He specialises in the Knowledge Management (KM) discipline of knowledge transfer of Organisational Memory (OM) to successive generations of replacements. 

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to knowledge:

Corporate DNA refers, in business jargon, to organizational culture. It is a metaphor based on the biological term DNA, the molecule that encodes the genetic instructions in living organisms.

References

  1. ↑ Walsh, James P.; Ungson, Gerardo Rivera (January 1991). "Organizational Memory". Academy of Management Review. 16 (1): 57–91. doi:10.5465/amr.1991.4278992. ISSN   0363-7425.
  2. ↑ Corporate Amnesia, Butterworth Heinemann, 1998
  3. ↑ "Knowledge in a Social World", Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999
  4. ↑ "Knowledge, Mind, and Nature: An Introduction to Theory of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Mind", Random House, 1967
  5. ↑ "The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks", Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002
  6. ↑ "A Knowledge Model for Situation-Handling". Knowledge Research Institute, Inc., 2003
  7. ↑ "The Tacit Dimension". Anchor Books, 1967
  8. ↑ "Six Action Shoes", Longman Higher Education, 1991
  9. ↑ "Post-Capitalist Society". Butterworth Heinemann, 1993
  10. ↑ Harvey, J. F. (2012). Managing organizational memory with intergenerational knowledge transfer. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16, 400–417.
  11. ↑ Arnold Kransdorff, Corporate DNA: Using Organizational Memory to improve poor decision-making', Gower Publishing 2006
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