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White Papers
Designing Organizational Memory: Preserving Intellectual Assets
in a Knowledge Economy
by E. Jeffrey Conklin, PhD
Abstract
Knowledge management is an essential capability in the emerging
knowledge economy. In particular, organizations have a valuable
asset in the informal knowledge that is the daily currency of
their knowledge workers, but this asset usually lives only in
the collective human memory, and thus is poorly preserved and
managed. There are significant technical and cultural barriers
to capturing informal knowledge and making it explicit. Groupware
tools such as E-mail and Lotus Notes™ tend to make informal
knowledge explicit, but they generally fail to create a coherent
organizational memory. On the other hand, attempts to build
organizational memory systems have generally failed because
they required some additional documentation effort with no clear
short term benefit, or, like groupware, they did not provide
an effective index or structure to the mass of information collected
in the system. This paper explores the design of an organizational
memory system that overcomes the barriers to capturing informal
knowledge. The key component of this design is the use of a
display system which captures the key issues and ideas during
meetings and creates shared understanding in a knowledge team.
The paper briefly describes a display system, QuestMap™,
which uses hypertext to capture the thinking and learning in
large, complex projects. The paper ends with a few examples
of this kind of organizational memory system in action.
Keywords: organizational memory, corporate memory, organizational
learning, knowledge management, teamwork, decision rationale,
groupware
Introduction
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat
it.
--George Santayana
The basis of the new economy is knowledge work, and the workhorse
of this economy is the knowledge worker (Note 1). He or she
has a strong formal education, has learned how to learn, and
has the habit of continuing to learn throughout his or her lifetime.
The knowledge worker, unlike the blue collar and traditional
white collar worker, is an expert or specialist, because to
be effectively applied, knowledge must be specialized. As a
consequence, knowledge workers (unlike their clerk forebears)
must routinely come together to solve complex problems-they
work in teams.
Thus, it is not enough for a knowledge worker to be a good expert,
he or she must also have the skills of collaboration with other
knowledge workers. For example, he or she must be able to understand
and be understood by people who do not have the same knowledge
base, and who thus frequently have different values and a different
model of the world. The productivity of a knowledge team will
depend on its being able to communicate and relate despite such
obstacles. However, our educational institutions little prepare
us for this kind of high collaboration. As Peter Drucker says,
"The productivity of knowledge work-still abysmally low-will
become the economic challenge of the knowledge society"
(Drucker, 1994).
A knowledge organization is one in which the key asset is knowledge.
Its competitive advantage comes from having and effectively
using knowledge. Examples include the law office, accounting
firm, marketing firm, software company, most government agencies,
universities, the military, and significant parts of most manufacturing
companies, whether they make cookies or cars. Knowledge organizations
are the container for knowledge workers, the vehicle through
which they apply their knowledge.
In the industrial era, factory machines were the scarce capital
resource, and the people to run them were regarded as interchangeable;
now knowledge workers are the scarce resource, moving freely
within and between organizations. This fluidity presents a new
challenge for knowledge organizations. Traditionally, organizations
acquired assets through capital, depreciated them, and finally
sold or junked them. The dominant asset of the knowledge organization,
however, is knowledge. Intellectual assets belong inherently
to people, and are the organization's assets only through their
application, capture, and reuse. If the people are unhappy,
unmotivated, or unskilled in the art of collaboration, their
precious intellectual assets are, from the organization's perspective,
wasted. When these people leave, a valuable asset leaves with
them.
Knowledge is the key asset of the knowledge organization. Organizational
memory extends and amplifies this asset by capturing, organizing,
disseminating, and reusing the knowledge created by its employees.
There are good reasons to pursue creating organizational memory
(Note 2). If a person had a memory like the average organization,
we would think he was very stupid, or suffering from a neurological
disorder. Organizations routinely "forget" what they
have done in the past and why they have done it. These organizations
have an impaired capacity to learn, due to an inability to represent
critical aspects of what they know.
But organizational memory is not just a facility for accumulating
and preserving but also for sharing knowledge. As knowledge
is made explicit and managed it augments the organizational
intellect, becoming a basis for communication and learning.
It can be shared among individuals working alone, by teams needing
a project memory, and by the organization as a whole for long
term and between-team memory. "Given the nature of organizations
and the competitive environment within which they exist, organizational
learning and the accumulation of knowledge will be source of
immediate health as well as long-term survival." (McMaster,
1995, p. 113)
Thus the short term payoff from an organizational memory system
can also be significant. Knowledge teams suffer much less rehashing
and repetition when the team makes its thinking explicit during
the problem solving process. Meetings become much more efficient.
Being more explicit also increases rigor and improves coordination.
New people can come up to speed on a project much faster by
reviewing the store of project knowledge; and when a team member
leaves, at least some of his or her informal knowledge stays
with the team.
This paper diverges from much of the previous work on organizational
memory by placing its emphasis on the worker, not the organization.
It explores the question, How can we design an organizational
memory system to serve the immediate needs of knowledge workers
first, with secondary emphasis on the organization's needs?
If organizational memory is so clearly beneficial, why is it
not a commonplace? Part One of this paper discusses three challenges
to creating an effective organizational memory: (1) informal
organizational knowledge, like a wild animal, resists capture;
(2) the usual approach to organizational memory, preserving
documents, fails to preserve context; and (3) knowledge loses
its relevance, and thus its value, over time. Part One closes
by touching on another potential challenge to organizational
memory: the current litigious environment may create an economic
incentive for "organizational amnesia".
The second half of the paper ventures into exploring the design
of an organizational memory system which takes the above challenges
into account. What are the components and features of an effective
organizational memory system? Part Two starts by observing how
the memory aspect of some familiar information systems (such
as humans and computers) is designed, and extrapolates this
into a pattern-short term mediation-that can be applied to the
design of organizational memory. Then it introduces the concept
of a display system which provides a knowledge team with a structure
for creating shared meaning in meetings, and which fits the
pattern of short term mediation. The approach described in this
paper relies primarily on short term payoffs; it focuses on
making knowledge capture a transparent part of everyday knowledge
work. Memory includes both storing and retrieving information,
but it should be clear that the problems of retrieval only come
up once you have successfully solved the problem of capture
to create an organizational memory containing knowledge that
workers need and want.
The paper ends with a few examples of an organizational memory
system in action, from clients who have been using a commercial
product which is based on the above design ideas.
Part One: Barriers to Creating Organizational Memory
The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking
we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve
at the same level that existed when we created them. --Albert
Einstein
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and
classify. --Ambrose Bierce
FORMAL AND INFORMAL KNOWLEDGE
In order to understand why knowledge is hard to capture we
must first distinguish two kinds of knowledge: formal and informal.
Formal knowledge is the stuff of books, manuals, documents,
and training courses. It is the primary work product of the
knowledge worker, in the form of reports, white papers, plans,
spreadsheets, designs, memos, etc. Knowledge organizations easily
and routinely capture formal knowledge; indeed, they rely on
it-without much success-as their organizational memory.
But there is another kind of knowledge as well. It is the knowledge
that is created and used in the process of creating the formal
results. If formal knowledge is the foreground, this knowledge
is the background. It includes ideas, facts, assumptions, meanings,
questions, decisions, guesses, stories, and points of view.
It is as important in the work of the knowledge worker as formal
knowledge is, but it is more ephemeral and transitory. This
kind of knowledge is "wild"-it is hard to capture
and to keep. Let us call this process-oriented stuff "informal
knowledge."
We can understand these two kinds of knowledge better if we
recall a similar distinction - between matter and energy. (This
metaphor is abstract and can be skipped without loss of understanding;
simply jump to Embracing Process below.) In quantum physics
elementary particles have a dual nature, as particles (i.e.,
matter) and as waves (i.e., energy). For example, light behaves
like a stream of particles (i.e., photons) from one point of
view, and like a series of waves from another. Similarly, knowledge
(both formal and informal) is particle-like when it is written
down, such as in a report, or encoded in an information system.
But knowledge has another form whose nature is much more like
a dynamic force or energy: the interaction of a group of people
in a context that leads to action. As with light, both forms
of knowledge are valid, each form has contexts in which it makes
the most sense, and in the course of knowledge work the action
shifts back and forth between these two manifestations.
The distinction between particle and wave forms of knowledge
illuminates the present reliance on formal knowledge for organizational
memory (see Figure 1: The Knowledge Form Matrix). Formal knowledge
usually manifests in its slower, heavier particle form, typically
in a document of some kind. Informal knowledge, however, rarely
shows itself in its particle form; it usually manifests (usually
in conversations and meetings) as fast moving, invisible wave
energy. Informal knowledge can be described as a standing-wave
or refraction pattern created by the wave fields of the participants.
Figure 1: The Knowledge Form Matrix
EMBRACING PROCESS
Informal knowledge is as an organizational asset of immense
value, because much of what is being created by and shared among
knowledge workers never makes it into formal documents. The
informal knowledge contains the background context for the organization's
formal documents. For example, informal knowledge answers such
questions as "Why did we do it that way?", "What
would happen if we stopped doing such and such?", "Hasn't
this problem been solved before?", "Did anyone consider
trying this other approach?", and "What did we learn
the last time this happened?" These are the questions that
send project teams scurrying to reinvent the wheel and repeating
discussions that have been "closed."
For all of the value of informal knowledge, the current practices
of knowledge work fail to capture, share, and reuse this asset.
Because it is often invisible (like most energy forms), informal
knowledge is viewed as "just talk," "soft information,"
or as nothing at all (Note 3).
One reason for the widespread failure to capture informal knowledge
is that Western culture has come to value results-the output
of the work process-far above the process itself, to emphasize
things over relationships. In other words, we have an artifact-oriented
culture, and this orientation is reflected in the way we work.
Within the artifact-oriented value system, formal knowledge-knowledge
in its particle form-is what counts. Informal knowledge, being
wave-like and thus generally invisible, is devalued and ignored
(Note 4).
If our organizational memory system is to include informal knowledge,
we must find ways to render the informal wave energy such that
it can be represented in information systems. The arrow in the
lower half of Figure 1 suggests that certain kinds of informal
knowledge, such as decisions, rationale, stories, and assumptions,
can be captured in their particle form in a display system,
as described in Part Two.
Another reason that informal knowledge is lost is that the tools
of knowledge work-based on computer and communication technology-little
recognize or support the process of knowledge work. Our tools
for knowledge work reflect the artifact-oriented ontology of
our culture, and create the illusion that finished knowledge
products (in the form of documents) spring forth from the word
processor polished and complete. These tools systematically
ignore the expensive thinking and learning that underlie the
formal work product. In the pre-computer office, for example,
when paper documents were circulated for review, valuable informal
knowledge accumulated on the document in the form of notes in
the margins. Such marginalia are less likely to be placed in
a document, or to be preserved with it, in a word processor
(Note 5).
An organizational memory that consists only of formal knowledge
is bare and lifeless. It is like describing the ball game by
giving the statistics, or the mystery novel by simply relating
the plot outline. It also lacks the history and context behind
the formal documents, and as result, the organizational "memory"
is essentially an immense heap of disconnected things, a giant
organizational attic. Documents that contain formal knowledge
that the organization has paid dearly to create live somewhere
on the corporate network with enlightening names like "H:\org\finan\arc\drg\693plan.doc."
(Note 6)
Because the organization's formal knowledge repository-the default
organizational memory-is dead and without context, it is often
ignored as a resource. If, however, an organization embraces
its informal knowledge, then the rationale behind decisions
and documents becomes the glue (Note 7) that holds the formal
knowledge documents together and preserves their meaning (Conklin,
1993).
ATTEMPTS AT ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY
Error is discipline through which we advance.
--William Ellery Channing
There was a project at an aerospace company some years ago in
which the team decided it would capture its project memory.
They preserved official reports, design documents, presentations,
memos, meeting minutes-virtually anything that they wrote down.
At the end of the project they had indeed created a project
memory: an office completely filled with stacks of paper, extending
almost to the ceiling. Even if someone thought there might be
valuable information stored in that room, no one ever wanted
to go in there and try to find it.
Other project teams have recognized the importance of preserving
the informal knowledge involved in the project. The team leader-keen
on the importance of capturing informal knowledge-instructs
the team members to write down important ideas, decisions, notes,
and communications, either on paper or in email. Everything
goes along fine until a deadline or milestone approaches and
the pressure increases-then the team quietly drops these extra
documentation duties in favor of doing their "real"
work-producing formal artifacts. Because of this, the ideas
created and the decisions made during this highly productive
crunch phase of the project are not captured.
A few project teams have attempted to capture their thinking
and learning by audio or videotaping their meetings. Inevitably
these teams end up with a staggering volume of tape. The key
bits of knowledge they need later on are in there somewhere,
but who has the time to watch or listen to it all to find them?
(Note 8).
A few projects have had the luxury of a project historian or
librarian-someone whose job is to capture and organize the knowledge
created in the course of the project. Unfortunately, these jobs
don't seem to last very long. Without a way to capture the informal
knowledge as well, and without an organizational commitment
to accessing and using this knowledge, it is just an expensive
way of filling the attic. Moreover, historians and librarians
tend to be regarded by project teams as outsiders, which can
further complicate their job (Note 9).
The concept of creating, archiving, and using learning histories,
as part of the research and engineering function, is an old
one. It is considered good engineering practice to create reports
documenting "lessons learned" on a project. However,
even in companies where this practice has become part of the
"standard operating procedure," it is very difficult
to find instances of the resulting document actually being referenced
in the next project, or of it informing future projects.
More recently, some organizations have attempted to use groupware
tools such as Lotus Notes™ to create and manage organizational
memory. Groupware is designed to be used for informal communications,
and thus has the potential to become a repository for an organization's
informal knowledge. Unfortunately, groupware messages and documents
tend to lack any structure, so the repository that gets created
is just an electronic version of the "attic full of stuff."
Most groupware applications include some search capability so
that users can search the database for particular keywords.
However, if the groupware application has caught hold, and is
thus heavily used, its database is usually is too jumbled and
incoherent for retrieval to be very satisfying or successful.
These experiments in capturing organizational memory paint a
gloomy picture of the prospect of preserving the most precious
asset of the knowledge organization. They illustrate that you
can't create a useful memory store just by capturing lots of
information, you must somehow organize it in ways that create
and preserve coherence and "searchability." These
experiments also illustrate a fundamental tension in the design
of an organizational memory system. When does this information
organizing, structuring, and indexing work get done?
Most current implementations of organizational memory postpone
this organizing effort as long as possible, or try to do it
automatically in the background (i.e., using artificial intelligence
techniques). Neither of these approaches can capture the critical
informal knowledge which gives the information context and has
it make sense.
For all its potential, we have not yet found a way to tap the
value in an organization's informal knowledge. My conclusion
is that the creation and use of organizational memory cannot
be a by-product, an extra bit of work hanging on the side of
the knowledge organization's main production process. If we
are to find ways of preserving the asset of informal knowledge,
we must look within the practices of everyday teamwork and change
them. Creating an effective organizational memory system entails
creating new tools and new practices, making changes in technology
as well as culture (Note 10).
MAKING INFORMAL KNOWLEDGE EXPLICIT
A world community can exist only with world communication,
which means something more than extensive [communication] facilities
scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a
common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals. --Robert
M. Hutchins
One of the biggest challenges facing teams is effective communication.
Almost all group dysfunctions come down to an inability or unwillingness
to say what we really mean or to hear and understand what is
said by another. The Holy Grail of teamwork is shared understanding.
A knowledge worker, as a specialist, lives in a rich and complex
world defined by his or her area of specialization. When knowledge
workers come together in teams, each person's depth of experience
and knowledge comes into play in the team's knowledge base.
But these differences in expertise can also block shared understanding
just as surely as if each person were speaking a different language.
To overcome this hurdle the team must slow down and take the
time to understand each other. Indeed, they must actively create
a framework of shared understanding, especially about key concepts
and terms, so that their collaboration is not repeatedly undermined
by subtle but disastrous miscommunication.
Lack of shared understanding can be debilitating. Too often,
team members see the problem they are working on differently,
then attribute the differences to incompetence or hostility
in the others, and so shift into a "battlefield mentality"
of protecting turf and taking new ground when possible. Some
level of competition may be healthy, but a knowledge organization
cannot afford the sheer waste of human energy and gumption that
results from the prevailing level of skills and tools for group
communication.
The secret to creating shared understanding is to make informal
knowledge explicit. This means capturing key ideas, facts, assumptions,
meanings, questions, decisions, guesses, stories, and points
of view in a clear and succinct language. It means organizing
this informal knowledge so that everyone has access to it. It
means changing the process of knowledge work so that the focus
is on creating and managing a shared display of the group's
informal thinking and learning (Note 11).
A remarkable thing happens when knowledge teams use a display
system (described below, page 21) to treat informal knowledge
as if it were valuable. Not only is a coherent record of the
team's thinking and learning created, but the team actually
works better and more productively. There is less repetition
in meetings, more rigor in decisions, and it is easier to bring
others (e.g. new team members, management, and other stakeholders)
up to speed on the team's thinking and learning. In other words,
when you take process-oriented knowledge seriously, the process
itself immediately improves. More bluntly, a powerful way to
avoid organizational stupidity is to take the process of knowledge
work seriously enough to capture and share the informal knowledge
involved.
As a group of people explores a problem, creating new meanings
and shared understanding, energy is created. Capturing informal
knowledge through use of a display system is a way of storing
this energy. The energy is later released when these same people,
or a whole new group, come back to understand and take action
based on that earlier thinking and learning. But while the stored
energy is finite, there is no limit to the amount of energy
that can be released by using the captured knowledge in new
ways.
DOCUMENTS WITHOUT CONTEXT
The second barrier to effective organizational memory is that
the usual approach to organizational memory, preserving documents,
fails to preserve the context which gives the documents meaning,
the very thing that allows them to be useful in the future,
when the context has changed.
Because current notions of organizational memory are artifact-oriented,
they focus on preserving, organizing, indexing, and retrieving
only the formal knowledge as it is stored in documents and databases.
For some tasks, formal knowledge alone is sufficient; for example,
when it is time to write the new annual report, you might start
with last year's annual report as a template.
However, most knowledge work is performed in the quest for solutions
to "wicked problems" (Kuntz & Rittel, 1972), problems
for which there is no clear and agreed upon definition of the
problem, and, indeed, in which the problem itself is apt to
change over time. Wicked problem solving is characterized by
making lots of assumptions, educated guesses, and decisions
under conditions of uncertainty. Decisions must often be revised
or even retracted. In contrast with the linear techniques (Note
12) that have been adequate for solving "tame" problems,
wicked problems require both traditional linear techniques and
a heavy dose of social interactions: conversations, meetings,
presentations, phone calls, email, etc. When you are working
on a wicked problem, your primary goal is not so much to find
a "right answer" as to find a solution which has broad
ownership.
In this context, an "attic" of formal documents is
simply not rich enough to support knowledge work. For example,
a team may come together for many meetings in the course of
resolving a wicked problem, but the practice of creating and
circulating meeting minutes is a relatively blunt instrument
for creating continuity and coherence among these meetings.
Meeting minutes are sketchy, represent only one person's point
of view, and usually lack the energy and sense of the conversations
they were meant to capture.
Because projects devoted to resolving wicked problems can often
stretch into months and years, a group memory for informal knowledge
becomes more than just a good idea. As the meetings spread over
days and weeks one can soon sense the number of ideas that are
getting repeated over and over, and the growing number of issues
that are slipping through the cracks. An explicit group memory
provides more continuity among these sessions, allowing the
group to pick up where it left off, with a minimum of repetition
and loss of important issues. As team membership changes over
time, or the project is handed off to a completely new team,
the organizational memory can in principle reduce the likelihood
of false starts and duplication of previous work.
As the number of ideas and issues accumulates, it soon overwhelms
the memory capacity of even the smartest team members. How often
is progress in a meeting blocked by disagreement over what was
discussed or concluded at a previous meeting? Is it not strange
that we accept this state of affairs as somehow normal and inevitable?
A shared memory for the group creates coherence within the mass
of formal and informal project knowledge, allowing everyone
to relax, focus on shared understanding, and think more creatively.
Therefore, I claim that knowledge work, especially work on wicked
problems, requires tools and processes which preserve the context
of the work as it evolves, and that preserving merely the artifacts
of the work (the formal documents) fails to do this. The preserved
context takes the form of a web of information which includes
facts, assumptions, constraints, decisions and their rationale,
the meanings of key terms, and, of course, the formal documents
themselves.
RELEVANCE AND SIZE
Many are always praising the by-gone time, for it is natural
that the old should extol the days of their youth; the weak,
the time of their strength; the sick, the season of their vigor;
and the disappointed, the spring-tide of their hopes.
--Caleb Bingham
For all of its frailties, human memory has an extraordinary
capacity for relevance. The third challenge for an effective
organizational memory system-a system that includes informal
knowledge-is that knowledge tends to lose its relevance, and
thus its value, over time. Informal knowledge, being more contextual
and wave-like, is even more dynamic in this way. An organizational
memory system must therefore, like human memory, have the capacity
to recall whatever is relevant and salient to the moment (Note
13). Closely related to this is the problem of the sheer size
of organizational memory. There will be inconceivable volumes
of corporate knowledge accessible on-line (Note 14) in the near
future-if only you could find the specific bits of knowledge
that are relevant to your immediate problem! This is already
the case on the World Wide Web.
One popular view has it that the way people preserve relevance
is by uncluttering their minds-forgetting most of what they
have learned. But this is not true in human cognition. Human
memory does not deliberately flush old information to make room
for new, nor does it overwhelm you with too much information
when you are trying to recall something-there is no problem
(in everyday experience) with "remembering too much"
or "knowing too much." We often think highly of people
with good memories, and pity those who are forgetful. Forgetting
is an aspect of memory, but the mechanism is not a purging but
a gradual fading over time through disuse.
On the other hand, there is also a risk that too much memory
can make an organization stupid, as in the frustration of having
an idea dismissed with "That won't work-we tried it before."
It seems sometimes that the group would be smarter if it didn't
remember so much about the past.
Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory
is too good. Nietzsche
The problem is not remembering too much but misapplying knowledge
from the past. Simply being able to recall the past is not enough-one
must also be smart about how that knowledge can be applied.
The size of organizational memory can be a considerable obstacle.
Current searching and filtering mechanisms still perform poorly
in the face of a huge amount of information. The heart of the
problem is that human memory has an extraordinary capacity for
meaning, and thus for relevance. Relevance is a delicate thread.
Unlike computers, biological memory appears to be holographic
in nature: a given piece of knowledge is not stored in a single
address or data field, it is distributed all over the brain.
And unlike computers, human memory is associative in nature:
a given piece of knowledge is accessed through a rich network
of semantic associations. Biological memory gains an extraordinary
degree of resiliency and flexibility through its holographic
and associative neural network mechanisms.
How can we create analogous mechanisms for organizational memory,
which allow it to preserve vast amounts of information while
providing discerning retrieval of relevant knowledge when and
where it is needed?
Here is an example. A team is working on developing a new kind
of valve for an oil recovery device that their company manufactures.
The valve must be able to operate at very cold temperatures,
and not get stuck even if the oil flowing through it turns very
viscous. The specialists on the team (in mechanics, fluid dynamics,
cryogenics, etc.) have standard resources they use to get the
basic formal knowledge they need for the design. But, generally,
they proceed as if they are working in a kind of vacuum. How
do they know if someone in the company has tried to create such
a valve in the past? Perhaps an earlier effort was mounted but
failed; perhaps it was technically successful but put on the
shelf; perhaps someone showed that it was a practical impossibility
and abandoned the effort. Perhaps there is, somewhere else in
the company (or in a partner company) a specialist who has thought
about this problem, but not published any of her results.
For a computer system to augment this team's memory, it should
have the following features:
- it makes it easy and natural to review similar cases and
projects for information that would be helpful now;
- it avoids false hits by paying attention to relevance and
meaning (e.g. On the valve project, doing a search for "oil"
and "valve" does not return an heap of documents
about cholesterol and heart disease);
- at the same time as avoiding the false hits, it finds items
which are related in interesting ways (e.g. A search for "oil"
and "valve" does return items dealing with "refrigeration
plumbing");
- it preserves context, by providing that retrieved "fact-oids"
come with the context in which they originally made sense;
- it captures whatever learning this team does and automatically
adds it to the organizational memory;
- as meaning evolves over time, the links and indexes in the
system evolve correspondingly.
The oil valve project team is not alone: the same problems
confront knowledge teams who need to know who else in their
enterprise has worked with a given client, or has struggled
to comply with a given law or regulation, or has used a given
piece of equipment or software, or has bought from a given vendor.
Technically, there are exciting possibilities for the use of
hypertext, groupware, intelligent agents, neural networks, advanced
search techniques, genetic algorithms, and other computing technologies
to provide "relevance retrieval" access in large databases-retrieval
which respects the meaning relationships among the stored items.
However, in terms of providing the features listed above, these
technologies are still experimental.
For the near future at least, human intelligence and effort
will remain a key component of the kind of intelligent retrieval
that respects meaning and relevance. Some level of human expertise
will be required, such as a librarian who can track subtleties
of meaning and help with the indexing and structuring of the
organizational memory. Moreover, as language and meaning evolve
over time, some intellectual work must go into the re-indexing
and re-structuring necessary to keep the organizational memory
from becoming a historical curiosity.
Social mechanisms can also be used to assure relevance and meaning.
In Japanese corporations, knowledge workers have many different
jobs over time, moving around the organization so that they
become part of a rich human network of experience and knowledge.
Japanese corporations also have people whose whole job is technology
transfer, i.e. cross-fertilization of knowledge among divisions
and from outside the corporation. This practice seems to reflect
a commitment to knowledge "retrieval" in the widest
sense.
It is important to bear in mind that the problems of retrieval
(size, meaning, relevance) only come up once you have successfully
solved the problem of creating an organizational memory that
contains knowledge that workers need and want. Creating such
a memory store requires capturing the knowledge and organizing
it effectively. Thus the senior challenge is capture that preserves
relevance and meaning, in other words, capture of informal as
well as formal knowledge. Capture of informal knowledge can
easily be, and generally has been, prohibitively expensive,
as described in the previous sections ( "Attempts at Organizational
Memory," page 8, and "Documents without Context,"
page 11). However, if you shift the emphasis from "how
to capture all this stuff?" to "how to improve the
process of teamwork such that capture happens by itself?"
you get a surprising answer. The thrust of this paper is that
use of a display system to increase shared understanding-by
making informal knowledge explicit-improves the knowledge work
process, and, as if by happy accident, solves the capture problem
as well.
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