I've been tracking this thread on Corporate Memory with great
interest. My research over the last decade has been about
how to get knowledge workers to capture and manage
organizational memory, so I'm really excited to see it
becoming a mainstream topic and concern.
I have been working on a paper on this subject, titled
"Organizational Memory: Preserving Intelletual Assets in a
Knowledge Economy". It is too long to post here, I think,
but I would like to see if some of the ideas in it could
become part of this dialog. (BTW, it also makes contact with
some of the ideas that Bernie DeKoven has expressed in his
postings on "Good Meetings".)
Here is the abstract of the paper:
"Knowledge organizations have a valuable asset in the
'informal knowledge' that is the daily currency of its
knowledge workers, but this asset is captured only in the
collective human memory and is thus poorly preserved. To be
captured and managed this informal knowledge must first be
made explicit. There are significant barriers, both
technical and cultural, to honoring informal knowledge in
this way, but there is also a surprising benefit: the quality
and productivity of knowledge work can be substantially
increased. This paper outlines the challenges to creating
organizational memory, and offers a simple first step:
improve meetings by making informal knowledge explicit and
shared."
The paper is a working draft and is about 10 pages long. I
would very much appreciate comments and questions. I am
planning to include it as a chapter in a book I'm writing,
and hoping also to publish it somewhere as a standalone
article.
If you would like a copy, send me email (conklin@cmsi.com)
with the Subject
Request for Org. Memory Paper
telling me whether you want a plain text (.TXT) or Rich Text
Format (.RTF) version of the paper (there are no figures
yet). I'll send it to you by reply.
Cheers,
Jeff
--
Jeff Conklin, Chief Scientist, Corporate Memory Systems, Inc.
11824 Jollyville Road, Suite 101, Austin, Texas 78759
512 918/8000 Voice
512 918/9600 Fax
Email: conklin@cmsi.com WWW: http://www.cmsi.com/info