comps reading - Designing Organizational Memory: Preserving Intellectual Assets in a Knowledge Economy

Written by Jeff Conklin, this paper introduced some computer systems such as Quest Map, Organization Memory System, Short Term Store, Display System, and IBIS (Issue-Based Information System), all of which are designed to preserve intellectual assets in a knowledge economy. According to Conklin, the key component of such project memory system that can capture informal knowledge is the use of a display system that captures the key issues and ideas during meeting.

The whole society is gradually turning itself into a knowledge economy, whose basis is knowledge work, and the workforce of this economy is the knowledge worker. Some characteristics a knowledge worker possess include :

1. scarcity
2. fluidity
3. expertise
4. collaboration

Conklin talked about formal and informal knowledge. While the former usually refers to books, manuals, documents, and training courses, the latter is created and used in the process of creating the formal results (knowledge). To put metaphorically, if formal knowledge is the foreground, informal knowledge is the background. Informal knowledge, being wild and process-oriented, is hard to capture and to keep. Reasons for the failures to capture informal knowledge are as follows:

1. artifact-oriented culture: (Western) culture has come to value results - the output of the work process - far above the process itself, and to emphasize things over relationship.
2. the tools of knowledge work - based on computer and communication technology - little recognize or support the process of knowledge work. Tools for knowledge work in a sense reflect the artifact-oriented ontology of the culture.

What follows are four barriers to effective organizational memory:

1. making informal knowledge explicit: informal organizational knowledge, like a wild animal, resists capture
2. documents without context: the usual approach to project and organizational memory, preserving documents, fails to preserve context
3. relevance and size: knowledge loses its relevance, and thus its value, over time
4. litigation and organizational amnesia: the current litigious environment may create an economic incentive for "organizational amnesia," the systematic destruction of all unneeded personal notes and documents at regular intervals

In a word, the obstacles to an effective organizational memory system fall into two categories: cultural and technical.

In describing steps toward organizational memory, Conklin provided three metaphors to demonstrate the operation of how memory is mediated between both short term and long term memory. The four metaphors, together with the illustrations, are as follows:

• computer architecture

• human cognition

• living cells

For the pattern of mediated memory in information system and the proposed model of the project memory, the illustration looks almost the same, as follows:

The display system proposed in this article has three components that fits the criteria for project memory system:

1. capture of information into the system
2. a structure by which the information is organized
3. a representation and display of that information, usually to a group

(for criteria details, refer to pg. 26-27 in the paper)

Such display system aims to promote collaboration, for a central assumption of this paper is that most knowledge work happens in groups, and that group work is largely conversations.

(for article summary, refer to pg 38-39 in the paper)