Organizational Memory:Issues in Design & Implementation

Sree Nilakanta

May 1, 2000

Organizational Memory

• Stored information from an organization’s history that can be brought to bear on present decisions. The information is stored as a consequence of implementing decisions to which they refer, by individual recollections, and through shared interpretations.

– Walsh and Ungson (1991), AMR, vol. 16.

Assumptions of OM

• Organizations functionally resemble Information Processing Systems

• Organizations are Interpretative Systems

• Organizations have distinct Ontological Systems

Imperatives for OM

• Retention Structure (Locus of OM)– Individuals, Culture, Transformations,

Structures, Ecology

• Processing Architecture– Acquisition, Retention, Retrieval

• Impact on Organizational Outcomes & Performance– Use, Misuse, Abuse

OM Research Suggestions

• Phase I– Assess structure of OM

• Phase II– Parse the Process

• Phase III– Assess Consequences

Organizational Memory

Organizational Memory

Recorder

Knowledge Percolator

Composer & Builder

Knowledge Navigator &

Retriever

Enterprise Information PortalA Vehicle for OM

• Business intelligence

• Content management

• Data warehouse

• Data management

Enterprise Information Portal

EIP Design Parameters

EIP Applications

Post Millenium Priorities

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence

• Business Intelligence Applications leverage enterprise database sources to provide timely, accurate and targeted information across the enterprise.

• Query, Reporting, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), Data Mining and Analytical Applications.

Content Management

Content Management

• Content Management systems capture, archive, index, manage, combine and distribute internal and external information to create a corporate knowledge repository.

Content ManagementCase Study

http//www.domaindlx.com/bindu/

Data Warehouse/Data Mart

• Data Warehouses and Marts create an environment where data is stored, managed and optimized for analysis.

Data Management

• Data Management systems perform Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tasks, clean data and facilitate scheduling, administration and metadata management for Data Warehouses and Marts.

Document Workflow Management

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

Source: Communications of AIS Volume 1, 1999 Article 7 13Knowledge Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Benefits by Alavi and Leidner

Knowledge Management

• Characterized as the problem of identifying the personal and collective knowledge existing in an organization and making it available to the relevant people.

– Success depends on understanding unstructured information

– Innovation depends on searching knowledge domain

Key Concerns Related to Knowledge Management

Source: Communications of AIS Volume 1, 1999 Article 7 13Knowledge Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Benefits by Alavi and Leidner

Market Opportunity

Papers

• Tools for Organizational Decision Support: The Design and Development of an Organizational Memory System– Introduced a model for capturing and parsing

organizational memory– HICSS 1997

Meeting Maker

Meeting Maker

Meeting Maker

Papers

• Design & Implementation of Data Warehouses Using Metadata– the paper presents a CASE tool designed to

generate the SQL queries necessary to build a warehouse from a set of operational relational databases

– HICSS 1998, J of IST (review)

Data Warehouse Tool

Papers

• PROMIS: A Profiler of Organizational Memory and Institutional Systems– present an information retrieval model for

searching and retrieving distributed information.

– IRMA 1998

Papers

• Data Warehouse Generation: The Role of Mobile Agents in Capturing Data from Disparate and Multiple Sources.– The topic of integrating data from multiple

heterogeneous sources has been studied in this paper. A system based on the Voyager 2.0 mobile agent infrastructure is implemented in JAVA

– IRMA 1999

Papers

• Supporting Objects in the Data Warehouse Environment– we introduce a model for an object-oriented

data warehouse. The warehouse model is based on materializing object views and the current prototype has been implemented on top of the POET object-oriented database system.

– IEEE 1998, JDB (revision)

Papers

• Supporting Organizational Knowledge Management with Agents– The present work is focused on making the vast

amount of unstructured text more useful to committees. An agent environment has been designed and implemented.

– IRMA 2000

Papers

• A Collaborative Work Group-Based Model for Supporting Organizational Knowledge Management– The present work looks at making corporate

knowledge more useful to organizations by focusing on supporting collaborative work groups. We focus on presenting our knowledge model and briefly look at the prototypes used to test the feasibility of our model.

Software and Patent Disclosures

• Meeting Capture (1997)

• Meeting Playback (1997)

• Information Extractor, PROMIS (1997)

• Warehouse Query Translator (1999)

• Meeting Analyzer (1999)

• Knowledge Management & Discovery Model of OM (1999)

Quo Vadis?

• OM/KM Center for Research & Support• IT Leadership• Technology Transfer